A dynamic schema matching approach for multi-version web feature service retrieve

Web feature service is an important part of geospatial data interoperability and enables GIS data with different formats to be operated at feature-level. Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has already developed standard implementation specifications for Web feature service, and for those Web feature services with different versions, such as WFS1.1, WFS1.0. OGC also define different schemas. Different version Web feature service has different schema and different version WFS service support different data formats, all these result in problems for interoperability among web feature service with different versions. Such as user only request some versions WFS service specified by WFS server, when WFS server find the request service version is not supported by it may cease communicating with user. In order to enable multi-version Web feature service requests in a uniform interface, the paper design a service retrieve plug-and-play middleware to match different version schemas dynamically and automatically transform the XML result document into a form that meet the requirement of user request, ultimately to achieve WFS service request independence of service version. At end the whole system's schema matching quality and information retrieval efficiency have been tested successfully in GeoServer WFS services, the tested results show the feasibility of the designed approach.