Description of an ontology-based remote sensing model service with an integrated framework environment for remote sensing applications

To date, many remote sensing processing and analysis models have been developed; however, sharing and integrating these heterogeneous and distributed models represent significant challenges. This study proposes an ontology-enabled integrated framework that allows collaboration among service providers and application users to semantically discover and utilize remote sensing services. The novelty of the proposed framework resides in the combined use of ontologies and workflows. In this study, the following components have been developed: (1) the description of 11 ontologies and an ontology editor that is used to formalize remote sensing model semantics; (2) an ontology-enabled catalogue to discover service semantics; (3) a user interface to submit queries and retrieve results; and (4) an ontology engine to analyse semantic inferences to discover the required services. To test the effectiveness of this framework, a prototype system was implemented. In addition, we discuss the results and identify future directions for research regarding the proposed framework.