Functional description of geoprocessing services as conjunctive datalog queries

Discovery of suitable web services is a crucial task in Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). In this work, we develop a novel approach to the discovery of geoprocessing services (WPS). Discovery requests and Web Processing Services are annotated as conjunctive queries in a logic programming (LP) language and the discovery process is based on Logic Programming query containment checking between these descriptions. Besides the types of input and output, we explicitly formalise the relation between them and hence are able to capture the functionality of a WPS more precisely. The use of Logic Programming query containment allows for effective reasoning during discovery. Furthermore, the relative simplicity of the semantic descriptions is advantageous for their creation by non-logics experts. The developed approach is applicable in the Web Service Modeling Framework (WSMF), a state-of-the-art semantic web service framework.