Development trend of Geospatial Web Services

An increasing number of people are paying attention to Geospatial Web Services (GWS). Geospatial applications are often not only involved mass data and intensive computing, but also need many services to form a service chain. Current dispersed GWS can neither solve the semantic heterogeneity problem, nor provide an intelligent process to fulfill integrated applications automatically. The Semantic Web technologies and Web services standards provide promises to make GWS automate in discovery, matching, and combining. In this paper, the effect of Semantic Web technologies and Web service standards is discussed. The Intelligent Geospatial Web Services (IGWS) is put forward. A framework of implementing IGWS is proposed to describe, discover, match, and chain services for geospatial application. This framework uses geo-ontology as services description, reasoning, and checking mechanism; and will better extend GWS.