Geospatial Semantic Web Services: A Case for Transit Trip Planning Systems

Semantic heterogeneity in diverse data sources is a major obstacle in real time data access, exchange and integration. This chapter provides a unique approach to address this issue by developing a framework and prototype for a geospatial semantic web service, through a case study of transportation road networks and transit networks for a transit trip planning system. The uniqueness of this approach is that it takes advantage of the merits of ontology, Web Feather Services (WFS) and relational database query functions. Ontological constructs provide semantic definitions for geospatial data, making use of the spatial query functions of WFS for spatial data searches, the WFS client library for feature rendering, and relational database search functions for non-spatial data queries. The results show that this approach is more efficient than conventional methods of converting all data into ontology instances, as it avoids the costs and consistency problems of data replication.