Semantic markup for geospatial Web services

A growing number of Web services, including more and more geospatial Web services, are becoming available to public, but it is difficult to find them and to judge whether they could be used in combination with other services on the Web .It is caused by the fact that conventional service descriptions fall short in capturing the semantics of services. In this paper, we firstly identify the possible problems that can result from such semantically heterogeneous descriptions during service composition. Then we present a method of ontology-based annotation to enrich service descriptions of geospatial Web services. The method allows for much more expressive descriptions than WSDL and can be used to semantically enable geospatial services discovery and composition.