SWING: A Geospatial Semantic Web Service Environment

Despite significant efforts over the past years, and now widely acceptedspecifications, the GIS world still faces severe heterogeneity and interoperabilityproblems, due to the lack of interoperability at the semantic level, bothin data and metadata. The SWING environment1 leverages the Semantic WebServices (SWS) paradigm and, combining it with GIS standards, tries to addressthese problems. This paper will describe the three usage scenarios of increasingcomplexity covered in the project. These use cases highlight the benefits andchallenges faced when the semantic and geospatial worlds meet.