SWING

SWING aims at deploying Semantic Web Service (SWS) technology in the geospatial domain. In particular, we address two major obstacles that must be overcome for SWS technology to be generally adopted, i.e. to reduce the complexity of creating semantic descriptions and to increase the number of semantically described services. Today, a comprehensive knowledge of logics, ontologies, metadata and various specification languages is required to describe a service semantically. We will develop methods and tools that can hide the complexity - and automate the creation - of the necessary semantic descriptions. The objective of SWING is to provide an open, easy-to-use SWS framework of suitable ontologies and inference tools for annotation, discovery, composition, and invocation of geospatial web services. SWING builds on the DIP and SEKT IPs, by adopting, combining and reinforcing their results. A main key to the solution is adapting the SWS technology of DIP to handle geospatial services and content. Another key is utilising and advancing the technology of SEKT to annotate geospatial services with semantic information. A targeted synergy between these two research initiatives are demanded to maintain and extend Europe's leading role in SWS. The SWING framework and pilot application will increase the use of distributed and heterogeneous services in geospatial decision making. The results can be reused in other domains and will boost the availability of semantic services and bring the vision of the SWS a great leap forward. Exploitation of SWING's results will provide Europe's decision makers and citizens with a new paradigm of information retrieval and new business opportunities.