A Research on Semantic Geospatial Web Service Based REST

Existing web service technologies are only at the syntactic level, we still have semantic gaps in cross-domain resource discovery, heterogeneous resource query, resource translation from one domain to another at the semantic level. The Semantic web seeks to expose the vast information resource of the web as data that computers can automatically interpret. This paper presents how semantic web technologies add values in building semantic geospatial web service using REST (Representational State Transfer, R. T. Fielding, 2000) based design methodologies. We illustrate semantic web service application in GIS domain, describe the characteristics of semantic REST requests/response approach and map the HTTP REST operations onto semantic ways. Semantic URIs (Uniform Resource Identifiers) rules are used to identify geospatial resources, and using RDF(Resource Description Framework) to describe the relationships of the geospatial resource and its concepts which shared meaning with ontologies and finally querying the distributed geospatial knowledge using SPARQL(SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language)/Update.