Supporting Geosciences Web Services Metadata Management and Discovery

Geosciences Web portals are becoming increasingly important for supporting geoscientists in their research. The GEO-SEED portal is a repository of geosciences web services metadata, represented in Resource Description Framework (RDF), which supports management and discovery by machines and automated agents. This project uses SPARQL, the W3C standard for querying RDF, to support discovery of web services. SPARQL query performance becomes more critical as the amount of RDF metadata in the repository increases. Most existing RDF storage systems are based on relational database technology. The problem with most of these systems is that their query performance is limited by the use of fixed schema mapping strategies. In this paper, we present our system, called S2ST, which addresses this issue in the context of geosciences web services metadata management. Our experiments show that S2ST provides better SPARQL performance than existing relational RDF storage systems.