A pragmatic GIS-oriented ontology for location based services

With advances in automatic position sensing and wireless connectivity, location-based services (LBS) are rapidly developing, particularly in fields of geographic, tourism and logistic information systems. Currently, Web service has been viewed as one of most significant innovations in business industry, and designed on demand to provide spatial related information for LBS consumption. However, the traditional Web Service Description Language (WSDL) cannot meet those requirements, as WSDL is not able to support semantic content and information. In recent years, Ontology came up with an effective approach to enhance service description, automated discovery, dynamic composition, enactment, and other tasks such as managing and using service-based systems. In this paper, we propose geographic ontology based on Geography Markup Language (GML) and extend OWL-S profile to form geographic profile. Web service, which is advertised on the basis of our GeoProfile, contains geographic information inherently.