Annotating OGC web feature services automatically for generating geospatial knowledge graphs

Abstract

The spatial data infrastructure initiatives are now broadly developed and deployed. However, while plenty of tools use them, some tasks are still complex to perform by non-expert users, such as finding, accessing, and using some of their related OGC Web Services (OWS). One of the main reasons for these challenges is associated with semantic heterogeneity within these services. This entails a lack of proper descriptions and requires knowledge about data structure and domain-specific query languages to discover and retrieve these services. Semantic annotations of OWS play a crucial role in achieving semantic interoperability and addressing these associated challenges. In this article we describe an approach for enabling the automatic generation of semantic annotations of Web Feature Services (WFS) at their three request levels (GetCapabilities, DescribeFeatureType, and GetFeature), which are used to generate knowledge graphs. This approach uses various external services, ontological resources (POSM, DBpedia, GeoSPARQL, GeoNames, and datos.ign.es vocabularies), and knowledge bases (DBpedia and datos.ign.es). Moreover, this approach enables us to validate annotations obtained as a previous step to generating geospatial knowledge graphs. Additionally, we present our proposal through an application case and assess it using a representative set of 21 WFS services, achieving an average of 46.70% annotations, of which 22.29% and 35.52% were validated using DBpedia and datos.ign.es initiatives, respectively. This shows the feasibility of our approach to generate knowledge graphs from WFS services in an automatic way