An emergent semantics approach to semantic integration of geo-services and geo-metadata in Spatial Data

Infrastructures

Lorenzino Vaccari1, Pavel Shvaiko and Maurizio Marchese

Dipartimento di Ingegneria e Scienza dell'Informazione, University of Trento, Italy

email: vaccari/pavel/marchese@disi.unitn.it

Abstract In this paper, we will focus on the semantic heterogeneity problem as one of the main challenges in current Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). We first report the state of the art of the current approaches and proposed solutions to overcome such semantic heterogeneity problems, focusing both on geo-services integration and geo-data integration. We then propose a general framework to integrate different application ontologies used by geographic information services providers. The proposed framework is based on a novel view of the semantics of Web services coordination, implemented by using the Lightweight Coordination Calculus (LCC) language. In this approach, the service providers share explicit knowledge of the interactions in which their services are engaged and these models of interaction are used operationally as the anchor for describing the semantics of the interaction. Moreover, to discover and integrate geo-services and related geo-metadata, semantic matching need to be performed. The proposed framework explore the applicability of the methodology and the solution proposed by the S-Match system, a semantic matching system built at the University of Trento on top of a number of approaches both at the element level and at the structural level matching. Finally, we provide and discuss a preliminary evaluation of the proposed approach. Keywords: Semantic heterogeneity, GIS web services, ontology matching, similarity measurements, emergency response 1 INTRODUCTION The domain of Geographic Information (GI, in this paper, we will use the term “geographic information” to group different kind of geographic objects: geographic

1 Also affiliated to: Autonomous Province of Trento.

services or geo-services, geographic metadata or geo-metadata and geographic data or geo-data) is experiencing a rapid growth of both computational power and quantity of information, making large spatial-data archives available over the Internet. Recently available web applications, like Google Maps, have introduced Geographic Information System (GIS) services to ordinary Internet users, offering them high-resolution aerial imagery with responsive performance (Tu et al, 2006). Moreover, there is an increasing necessity to share this information between different stakeholders (departments in public administration, professionals, citizens, etc) and diverse information systems in order to enable a coherent and contextual use of GI. This necessity forms the basis for a number of international and national initiatives, to set up global, international, national and local infrastructures for the collection and dissemination of geographical data. Among the others: - The International Digital Earth: SRI International's DARPA-sponsored Digital

Earth project incorporates a connected suite of technologies with the vision of enabling a massive, scalable, and open model of the planet where millions of users can interact with vast quantities of geographically referenced (geo-referenced) data over the Web.

- The INfrastructure for SPatial InfoRmation in Europe (INSPIRE): an European initiative, started in 2001 by the European Commission, based on the goal to improve the accessibility, interoperability and affordability of spatial data and information systems in Europe. INSPIRE lists among its main objectives: “geographical data shall be made available for access and view free of charge by citizen and other users, with delivery, downloading and re-use on harmonized terms and conditions”.

- The Italian “Intesa Stato Regioni” which focuses on the issue of interoperability among existing geographical databases and related administrative procedures managed by Italian local Public Administrations (PA).

Moreover, a growing number of public institutions and private companies (GIS agencies) have adopted a GIS to handle their internal geographical information. A number of commercial and open source software packages are available to support such local activities. These products give a complete and powerful set of functionalities. The management of this geographical information is becoming the main challenge in the immediate future for every GIS agency. Beside this management challenge, the large quantity of the produced GIS data, the availability of high speed networks and sophisticated computer science technologies is creating a heterogeneous set of final users. Typical user roles include: - Public institution that requires geographic information to support institutional

duties (e.g. emergency, health, urban planning, tourism, etc). - International, National or local institution that coordinates and integrates

geographic information provided by different GIS agencies. - Research institution that wants to analyze the availability and the quality level of

geographic information covering a specific study area. - Private company that needs geographic information in order to create business

services and products (geo-marketing). - Non expert user, that needs to locate quickly and easily a geographical feature

(address, location name, institution, business activity, etc). To support all these kinds of users, and user’s requests, GIS agencies have started to adopt a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) model (see Bernard et al, 2005; Groot et al, 2000; Nebert D., 2004). While a GIS is a self-contained system in which data and software applications are used mainly internally, the SDI goal is to support the interoperability among different kinds of institutions, users and roles. In this paper we will focus on the open issues of general interoperability present in state-of-the-art Spatial Data Infrastructure. In particular, we will: - discuss the requirements and open issues of interoperability in distributed

geographic data and services. - describe the state of the art in the research area of semantic interoperability in

SDI. - propose and detail a framework for sharing heterogeneous geographical

information collected from different resources. - discuss a preliminary evaluation of the proposed approach to support typical SDI

tasks and, in the final sections, we present conclusions and future work. 2 SPATIAL DATA INFRASTRUCTURE INTEROPERABILITY ISSUES SDI, like other information technologies, must be implemented in a manner that allows easy interoperability between heterogeneous organizations and systems. The common SDI framework is based on a generic software platform, which supports a variety of geographic dataset types as well as comprehensive tools for data management, editing, analysis, and visualization. Moreover, to share geo-datasets, a number of geographic services have to be provided by the system. Both geographic data and geographic services are pervaded by interoperability problems. A definition and an analysis of interoperability in the field of GI is also given in (Kuhn W., 2005). In this section, in order to better present and discuss these issues, a separate analysis for geographic data (geo-data) and geographic services (geo-services) is presented.

2.1 Geo-data interoperability issues One of the key services supplied by a SDI is the possibility to retrieve geographical dataset provided by heterogeneous resources. Heterogeneity issues are common for a distributed system, but geographical datasets have specific properties, different from other types of data (Lemmens et al, 2006). Among others: - Multiple versions: multiple versions of the same entities on the Earth’s surface

can differ radically in terms of data model, scale, data generalization, and the conceptual models the data collectors use. Important semantic differences are also involved in the data, which are mostly collected by different government agencies.

- Implicit linking: in general, explicit references must be present to combine information in a meaningful manner. However, geographic information enables linking without explicit references, for instance via coordinate reference systems.

- Massive data sets: compared to general (administrative) information, geo-information can be massive. In case of satellite imagery, for instance, the raster data volumes are also huge.

- Maps as implicit interfaces: everyone is familiar with reading maps, so they’re a natural human–machine interface for the services interacting with the user and presenting (intermediate) results of geo-information.

- Geometry based information: because geo-information is geometry based, it’s possible to apply a whole set of common mathematical tools in geo-services (such as to compute the distance between two objects or compute the buffer around an object).

Due to the fact that the logical architecture of a SDI is based on a set of heterogeneous data resources, heterogeneous geographical information have to be integrated. Since each geo-data producer adopts internal rules in order to manage its geographical datasets, heterogeneity at the data level arises from a number of different reasons: - Different physical data formats: geo-datasets are stored using file systems, or

geo-databases, different sources (OGC specification compliant, legacy systems, etc), different data formats (“spaghetti” format like AutoCAD DWG, ESRI shape files, OGC Geographic Markup Language, etc).

- Different production processes: requirements for geo-datasets acquisition are different even if they are referred to the same geographical feature. Additional factors have also to be considered like integration alignment problem (due to different geographic projections, data collected at different scales, corrected using different elevation models, data production using different topographic sources).

- Different representation/resolution: each data source collects geo-datasets using a specific representation of the real word to fit requirements of the data producer. Often the same geographic feature is represented using different geometric features (for instance roads can be represented using polygons or lines) or multi-temporal techniques (Parent at al, 2006).

- Different schemas/ontologies: geographical features can be represented using different geometrical and data schemas. Heterogeneity of the data include structural heterogeneity (schematic heterogeneity) and semantic heterogeneity (data heterogeneity). Ontologies can be used to reduce GI heterogeneity (Fonseca et al, 2003). An ontology (see Guarino, N, 1998) for details) is a logical theory accounting for the intended meaning of a formal vocabulary (i.e., its ontological commitment to a particular concept of the world). However, different geographical data providers may use different application ontologies, so, heterogeneity problems arise when integrating the information from different application ontologies.

2.2 Geo-services interoperability issues Distribute services oriented architecture is a common framework for modern information systems (Papazoglou M.P., 2003). Heterogeneous services’ coordination is one of the main research topics in the field of web services. In the specific case of geo-services, which is no different from normal services, geo-services coordination includes: - Geo-services discovery: GIS desktop applications provides to the user a lot of

complex functions in order to perform GIS data acquisition, creation, analysis, visualizing and mapping. For years these functions were accessible only trough the GIS desktop application, but recently, GIS services have been published and available on the web. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and OGC specifications are the base technology used by SDI in order to provide catalogue services for discovering appropriate data and services for a specific task. The three main building blocks in GIS SOA are: (i) a GIS user community (potential users of GIS services), (ii) GIS Web services (provided by some GIS service providers) and (iii) a GIS catalog service (where available services are published by providers and discovered by users).

- Geo-services integration (composition and coordination) : after discovering, services can be composed to provide complex functionality. Although at present, the main available web service in GIS is the map request service, the trend is to supply a technological environment that provides a number of stand-alone GIS services. At the moment, the majority of these geo-services exist as single services. In the case of a request for a complex service a manual and static

composition of a number of basic geo-services has to be performed. The future challenge is the (semi)-automatic composition of the services in order to obtain flexible complex services based on the available web services. In practice, however, chaining geographic services is a nontrivial task, mostly because of interoperability problems among geo-services.

From a technological point of view, few problems exist when discovering and integrating available web services: SOA for business services and OGC specifications for geographic information represent the proper framework and technological solution for this kind of problems. But as in the case of geo-data, also geo-services are defined using implicit or, in the best case, local application ontologies. At present, no standard notions are used for defining the semantics of a geographic web service: the kind of the service, the number, name and the position of the input parameters and output parameters are totally independent from one GIS services provider to another. This problem is typically referred to as the need for “semantic interoperability among autonomous and heterogeneous systems”. Semantic heterogeneity (the differences in meaning) problem is an actual challenge for geographic services integration. Currently, geo-information search is performed using mainly string-matching techniques. Using natural language techniques could improve the semantic relevance of search results. However, current approaches are inherently restricted by the ambiguities of natural language, which can lead to low precision and /or recall. 3 RELATED WORK The research area of the semantic integration of geographic information is relatively young. In fact, even if the concept of geo-services publication is not new, GI OGC specification and ISO standards became stable only during last four-five years. Thereafter, different geo-information providers have started to publish their geo-data and services on the web in a standardized manner. Only recently integration and composition of GI became relevant and feasible. In this section, following the structure of the previous one, we divide the presentation and analysis of related work into two parts: geo-data integration and geo-services integration. 3.1 Geographic data integration Integrating data from heterogeneous sources is the fundamental task in order to enable value added services. Such task is complex, especially if the goal is the integration of different geographic datasets. As described in the previous section, geo-data heterogeneity depends on many aspects: acquisition quality aspects (e.g.

production process), technical aspects (e.g. different GIS software package) and semantic aspects (related to the diversity of application requirements addressed by different data providers). In the overall task, it is possible to identify two main issues: (1) geo-data integration alignment and (2) geo-data semantic heterogeneity. The first problem (geo-data integration alignment) depends on a number of factors: different geographic projections, data collected at different scales, corrected using different elevation models, data production using different topographic sources, etc. Such problems have been clearly identified and addressed by current research. As an example, in (Chen et al, 2003) the author proposes a general-purpose geospatial data integration framework to access and retrieve geospatial sources, to accurately and efficiently integrate sources using dynamically conflation operations in the integration plans, and quickly incorporate new sources that support geo-data standards. Although this issue is an important and complex aspect, in this paper we focus, instead, on the second issue: geo-data semantic heterogeneity. This problem is mainly due to the ambiguity of natural language during keyword-based annotation and query in catalogues. Due to the complexity of digital spatial data, a lot of efforts are dedicated to the management of special metadata framework information called geographical metadata. Several systems have been developed to support metadata lifecycle management for geographic information, but, once the geographical metadata are annotated, problems arise when querying geographical information with natural language terms. In (Lutz et al, 2006), authors present an approach to ontology based GI retrieval that contributes to the solution of existing problems of semantic heterogeneity and hides most of the complexity of the required procedure from the requester. Nevertheless, in the proposed approach, the authors always assume that a requester searches for only one source that provides all the required information. Moreover, the data provider has to create and register a complex application ontology. This is one of the crucial bottlenecks for the scalability of their approach. An interesting approach for searching geographical metadata repositories is based on the research project FuLL - Fuzzy Logic and Language (Bombara et al, 2006). FuLL goal is the development of a software technology that performs user natural language query translation using fuzzy logic techniques and a dialog-oriented approach. Thus, a simple interface is proposed to the user, which can perform its GIS query using natural language. The system’s main requirement is the creation of a common domain ontology between heterogeneous application ontologies. A specific methodology for geo-ontologies integration is also proposed in (Hess et al, 2006), where the authors present G-Match, an algorithm and an implementation of a

geographic ontology matcher. The goal is to give a similarity measure between two different geographic ontologies when integrating them. In order to do that, the algorithm considers the features of a concept separately and then gives some weights for each geographical feature (name, attributes, taxonomy, conventional and topological relationships) to compute the overall similarity between two concepts. As the information may be defined in different levels of detail, there is not a perfect combination of the weight factors assigned to each concept features. So, some sort of self-adaptation of the weight, depending on the input ontology, has to be performed. 3.2 Geographic services integration The main technological infrastructure to support web services publication, discovery and integration is based on SOA (Papazoglou M.P, 2003). This architecture is rapidly becoming the standard in the domain of distributed systems. In the case of geographic information, a SOA framework has been developed by OGC and has already been applied with success (see for instance, Vaccari et al, 2005). Technical Interoperability among geo services is mainly approached by using OGC catalogue services and through OGC syntactic interoperability standards. The most used are the Web Mapping Service (WMS) and the Web Feature Service (WFS). Some works has already been performed in automatically locating distributed SDI resources: Skylab Mobilesystems (http://www.ogc-services.net) use a form of Web crawling to locate WMS servers. Mapdex (http://www.mapdex.org) has a similar solution that’s oriented toward ESRI ArcIMS servers in addition to WMS. Mapdex uses the Google search API to find possible WMS sites by searching for WMS-specific query strings appended to URLs. Skylab Mobilesystems uses an unspecified Web crawler. OGC specifications and SOA technological solutions provide syntactic interoperability and cataloguing of geographic information. However catalogue services, still do not define any method for overcoming the semantic heterogeneity problem, described in the previous section. We list, in the following, recent research related to this specific problem. OGC is conducting the Interoperability Program (IP) in order to investigate this issue. For the geo-services specific case, a syntactic and semantic analysis is made in (Lemmens et al, 2006), where the authors develop a methodology that combines service discovery, abstract composition (identifying service chain functionality with the help of conceptual parameters), concrete composition (managing control and data flow among specific services), and execution. The application scenario is represented by a Risk Map service chain. In their approach, the authors present the

use of domain ontologies for the different steps in geographic service chaining. As they pointed at the end of their paper, the generic problem is shifted to the need of methods for automatically aligning and maintaining ontologies that different information communities use (ontology mapping). To minimize semantic heterogeneity problems, in (Lutz M., 2005) the author proposes a methodology for services discovery. This approach uses ontologies describing geospatial operations to create descriptions of requirements and service capabilities. The authors investigate how this methodology can be integrated into existing architecture for spatial data infrastructures, and present a prototypical implementation. In their approach, the authors currently consider only plug-in or exact matches between semantic signatures in order to limit the number of services found. The main focus in (Paul et al, 2006) is to integrate diverse spatial repositories for geographic applications using service-oriented architecture (SOA) for the discovery and retrieval of geospatial information. The architecture uses a central ontology as metadata information, which acts as service broker. Also here, the system is composed of a domain ontology (a global shared vocabulary) and of the service providers application ontologies that need to adopt the central ontology. In the GEOscience Network (GEON) project (http://www.geongrid.org) an interoperability framework has been developed to allow a data provider to register a geographic dataset with one or more mediation ontologies (e.g. standards for data structure and content) and subsequently query the different data sets in a uniform fashion (Lin et al, 2003). The system comprises an ontology repository, a data set registration procedure, and a query rewriting system. Structural and semantic heterogeneities of data sources are resolved using information from the dataset registration procedure and ontologies. Multiple ontologies are supported in the system by allowing users to define an articulation between two ontologies which equates some concepts in the source ontology to some concepts in the target ontology. Users are able to switch between ontologies for which an articulation exists. Nevertheless, this system can be adopted only in the case that the user adheres to the community (using the GEON registration procedure). Moreover the users need to align dataset and ontology manually. Finally, as a recent and relevant activity, we mention also the Muenster Semantic Interoperability Lab (MUSIL, http://musil.uni-muenster.de/temporary/?file=kop1.php). MUSIL, is a competence centre at the Institute for Geoinformatics of the University of Muenster. MUSIL goal is to solve specific semantic interoperability problems using real-world case-studies.

4 EMERGENT SEMANTICS AND APPROXIMATE STRUCTURE SEMANTIC MATCHING As delineated in the previous section, a number of challenging issues are still present in the area of GI semantic integration, in order to find an appropriate and practical solution. The main contributions of the paper include: - a P2P formalization to support for emergent geo-information semantics when

integrating different SDI application provided by different geographic information services.

- an application of the approximate structure preserving semantic matching algorithm, originally proposed in (Giunchiglia et al, 2007a) to support effective geo-ontology matching

Subsections 4.1 and 4.2 will describe in details these contributions. 4.1 P2P infrastructure to support emergent semantics In order to approach this issue, we propose to use a peer-to-peer (P2P) infrastructure in the SDI domain. At the core of our approach is a specific view on semantics of both web service and agent coordination as proposed in (Robertson et al, 2007). Peers share explicit knowledge of the “interactions” in which they are engaged and these models of interaction are used operationally as the anchor for describing the semantics of the interaction. As described also in (Cudré-Maurox, P. et al, 2006), “we aim at consolidating the local semantics of autonomous information agents (respectively information systems) into a global semantics that results from a continuous interaction of the agents. The structures emerging from these continuous interactions provide meaning to the local symbols. We consider semantics constructed incrementally in this way as emergent semantics”. Instead of requiring a universal semantics across peers we require only that semantics is consistent (separately) for each instance of an interaction. These models of interactions are developed locally by peers. However, they must be shared and interpreted by peers in order to support interaction coordination. In our approach, we achieve this by dynamically matching terms in the interaction models. This can happen both at design time (i.e., when synthesising different interactions models) and at execution time (i.e., when running them to perform specific tasks) where the proposed approach is capable to capture the semantics emerging from the peers’ interactions. The communication language employed to implement the interactions among peers

acting in our peer network is the Lightweight Coordination Calculus (LCC). LCC is a protocol language used to describe interactions among distributed processes, e.g., agents, web services. LCC was designed specifically for expressing P2P style interactions within multi-agent systems, i.e., without any central control; henceforth, it is well suited for modeling coordination of software components running in an open environment. Its main characteristics are the flexibility, the modularity and the neutrality to the distributed communication infrastructure (Robertson D., 2004). Interactions in LCC are expressed as the message passing behaviors associated with roles. The most basic behaviors are to send or receive messages, where sending a message may be conditional on satisfying a constraint (pre-condition) and receiving a message may imply constraints (post-condition) on the agent accepting it.

Figure 1: LCC fragment; double arrows indicate message passing; single arrows indicate constraint satisfaction

A basic LCC interaction is shown in Figure 1. The agent A1 playing the role r1 verifies if it needs the info X (pre-condition need(X)); if yes, A1 asks for X to the agent A2 playing the role r2 by sending the message ask(X). A2 receives the message, ask(X) from A1 and then obtain the info X (pre-condition get(X)) before sending back a reply to A1 through the message return(X). After having received the message return(X), A1 updates its knowledge (post-condition update(X)). The constraints embedded into the protocol express its semantics and could be written as first-order logic predicates (e.g., in Prolog) as well as methods in an object-oriented language (e.g., in Java). The characteristic of modularity allows separating the protocol from the agent engineering. While performing the protocol, peers can therefore exchange messages, satisfy constraints before (after) messages are sent (received) and jump from one role to another so that a flexible interaction mechanism is enabled still following a structured policy, which is absolutely necessary for team-execution of coordinated tasks.

As a use case for our approach, we have analyzed the organizational model of the distributed GIS Agency infrastructure of Trentino, Italy. The framework of the distributed system is represented by a number of specialized GIS agencies: civilian protection, urban planning, forestry, viability, etc. Each GIS agency is responsible for a subset of the geographic information for the local region. To support interoperability among the different GIS agencies the regional information infrastructure is shifting from a traditional GIS system to a SDI. We have focused on the principal roles of the GIS Agency (GA). The GIS Agency is responsible to provide geographic datasets and services to external service requestors. The main generic actors in the current organization model of the GA Agency in Trentino, together with a short description of their main roles, are the following: - GA_SR: (GIS Agency Service Requestor). Main role: ask for service (maps,

datasets, analysis, etc.). - GA_SP: (GIS Agency Service Provider). Main role: interface from external actors

and internal GA actors. Service aggregation (design time / run time). - GA_MAP: (GIS Agency Map Provider). Main role: building geographical maps

from a number of available sources of geo-data (GeoDBs). - GA_MEP: (GIS Agency Metadata Provider). Main role: GIS metadata provider

(formalized description, search, matching, etc.) from a number of available sources of geo-data (GeoDBs).

Figure 2 shows a simplified organizational model of the GIS Agency together with the main interactions (arrows).

Figure 2: The Trentino GIS Agency high level organizational model

GIS Agency Service Provider (GA_SP)

GIS Agency Service Requestor (GA_SR)

GIS Agency Map Provider

(GA_MAP)

GIS Agency Metadata Provider (GA_MEP)

GISDBs

Within the generic scenario, we focus on the most commonly used specific use case, i.e., Map Request Service where a peer request a particular map from a map service provider. Following a standard OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) WMS (Web Map Service) request we can model a subset of the role interactions from an external requestor to the service provider for the request of a map service: - The requestor assumes the GA_SR role and it asks to the service provider

(GA_SP) the list and the characteristics of the services (Capabilities) provided by the service provider.

- The service provider provides its capabilities, in particular: the list of available services (AvailableServices), the list of geographic datasets managed by the server (AvailableLayers), the file format of the return services (Format), and the geographic limits of the available services (XMin_ME,YMin_ME,XMax_ME,YMax_ME).

- Then, the GA_SR asks for the map service using the information received from the previous step. The RequestMap message contains the URL of the requested map (MapFile), the version of the service (Version), the requested geographic layers (Layers), the dimension of the map (Width, Heigth), the graphic format of the map (Format), the spatial coverage of the map (XMin_BB, YMin_BB, Xmax_BB, YMax_BB).

- The service provider provides the map (Map) requested by the requestor. - Finally, the service requestor asks for the graphic legend that describes the

previous map and the service provider sends the legend (Legend) to the service requestor.

Figure 3 and Figure 4 show respectively the LCC code related to GA_SR and to GA_SP roles described above. - GIS agency service requestor (see Figure 3). The GIS agency service requestor

R initiates the coordination task by entering the GA_SR role. According to this role the agent R assumes the role GA_SR and asks for the capabilities of the services provider. It uses the service address (MapFile) and the software version of the client request (Version). After that, the service requestor waits until the service provider returns the list of its capabilities. In our case it waits for the list of the available services (AvailableServices), the list of the available layers (AvailableLayers), the format of the returned file (Format), and the geographic coverage (map extent) of the available services (XMin_ME, YMin_ME, Xmax_ME, YMax_ME). In the second step the agent R asks to the service provider for a map. It selects some of the available geographic layers (selectLayers(AvailableLayers,Layers)), defines the map dimension

(needMap(Width,Height)) and selects an area from the available geographic extension (selectBoundingBox(XMin_ME, YMin_ME, XMax_ME, YMax_ME, XMin_BB, YMin_BB, XMax_BB, YMax_BB)). The third operation is the request of the map legend for the selected layers.

Figure 3: LCC fragment for the GIS agency service requestor role

- GIS agency service provider (see Figure 4). The GIS agency service provider P

assumes the role ga_sp and waits for one of the following requests: requestCapabilities, requestMap and requestLegend. In the former case, after receiving the request from the service requestor, it builds its capabilities (getCapabilities(MapFile, Version, AvailableServices, AvailableLayers, Format, Xmin_ME, YMin_ME, Xmax_Me, YMax_ME)) and passes them to the requestor. In the second request the service provider builds a digital map (getMap constraint) and passes it to the service requestor. In the third case the service provider agent provides a legend for a collection of requested layers.

Figure 4: LCC fragment for the GIS agency service provider role

In the following sub-section we will use the getMap constraint (highlighted in a box in Figure 4 to facilitate the presentation) as the motivating example to the structure preserving semantic matching approach.

4.2 Approximate Structure Preserving Semantic Matching algorithm An ontology typically provides a vocabulary that describes a domain of interest and a specification of the meaning of terms used in the vocabulary. Depending on the precision of this specification, the notion of ontology includes various data and conceptual models (Euzenat and Shvaiko, 2007). The term ontology is used here in a wide sense, and, hence, encompasses sets of terms, classifications, database schemas, thesauri, etc. Ontology matching is a plausible solution to the semantic heterogeneity problem faced by information management systems. We view ontologies as graph-like structures (Giunchiglia and Shvaiko, 2003). We think of matching as an operation that takes two graph-like structures, such as web service descriptions, and produces a set of correspondences between the nodes of the graphs that correspond semantically to each other (Giunchiglia et al, 2007b). Then, these correspondences can be used for various tasks, including data translation, etc. Thus, matching ontologies enables the knowledge and data expressed in the matched ontologies to interoperate.

In our scenario, since there is no a priori semantic agreement (other than the interaction model), the ontology matching component is needed to automatically make semantic commitments between the interacting parts. It poses additional constraints on conventional ontology matching. Specifically, we need to compute the correspondences holding among the full graph structures and preserve certain structural properties of the graphs under consideration. Thus, the goal here is to have a Structure Preserving Semantic Matching (SPSM) operation. This operation takes two graph-like structures and produces: (i) one-to-one correspondences between semantically related nodes of the structures preserving a set of structural properties of the graphs being matched, namely that functions are matched to functions and variables to variables, (ii) only in the case if the graphs globally correspond semantically to each other, e.g., graph1 is 0.65 similar to graph2, according to some measure. Let us suppose that we want to match the constraint (e.g. a web service description) - getMap(MapFile, Version, Layers, Width, Height, Format, XMin_BB, YMin_BB, XMax_BB, YMax_BB) (see also Figure 5) - with a similar but different one - getMap(Dimension(Width, Height), MapFile, Edition, Layers, DataFormat, Request, Xmin, Ymin, Xmax, Ymax). As shown in Figure 5, the first web service description requires the first argument of getMap function (MapFile) to be matched to the third (MapFile) of getMap function in the second description. Version in the first web service description must be passed to the second web service as the edition argument. Moreover, request on the right has no corresponding term on the left. The approach outlined next follows the work in (Giunchiglia et al, 2007a). We briefly report it here for completeness and discuss it with the help of examples from the SDI domain. We focus on tree-like-structures. The matching process is organized in two steps: (i) node matching and (ii) tree matching. Node matching solves the semantic heterogeneity problem by considering only labels at nodes and domain specific contextual information of the trees. We use here the S-Match system (Giunchiglia et al, 2007b). Technically, two nodes n1 and n2 in trees T1 and T2 match if: c@n1 R c@n2 holds based on S-Match.

Figure 5: Two web service descriptions (trees) and correspondences (lines) between them

Where c@n1 and c@n2 are the concepts at nodes n1 and n2 and R ∈ {=, , , “not related”}. In particular, in semantic matching (Giunchiglia and Shvaiko, 2003) as implemented in the S-Match system (Giunchiglia et al, 2007b) the key idea is that the relations (e.g., =, ) between nodes are determined by (i) expressing the entities of the ontologies as logical formulas and (ii) reducing the matching problem to a logical validity problem. Specifically, the entities are translated into logical formulas which explicitly express the concept descriptions as encoded in the ontology structure and in external resources, such as WordNet (Miller, 1995). This allows for a translation of the matching problem into a logical validity problem, which can then be efficiently resolved using sound and complete state of the art satisfiability (SAT) solvers (Giunchiglia et al, 2005). Notice that the result of this stage is the set of correspondences holding between the nodes of the trees. Tree matching, in turn, exploits the results of the node matching and the structure of the trees to find if these globally match each other. For obvious reasons we are interested in approximate tree matching. Technically, two trees T1 and T2 approximately match if there is at least one node n1i in T1 and node n2j in T2 such that: (i) n1i approximately matches n2j, (ii) all ancestors of n1i are approximately matched to the ancestors of n2j. Notice that the horizontal order of siblings is not preserved being not a desirable property for the data translation purposes.

The implementation of approximate structure preserving semantic matching is based on (i) the theory of abstraction and (ii) the tree edit distance. Specifically, the work in (Giunchiglia and Walsh, 1992) categorizes the various kinds of abstraction operations, including: - Predicate (Pd): Two or more predicates are merged, typically to the least general

generalization in the predicate type hierarchy, e.g., Height(X) + Dimension(X) → Dimension (X). We call Dimension(X) a predicate abstraction of Height(X), namely Dimension(X) Pd Height(X). Conversely, we call Height(X) a predicate refinement of Dimension(X), namely Height(X) Pd Dimension(X).

- Domain (D): Two or more terms are merged, typically by moving constants to the least general generalization in the domain type hierarchy, e.g., Xmin_BB + Xmin → Xmin. We call Xmin a domain abstraction of Xmin_BB, namely Xmin D Xmin_BB. Conversely, we call Xmin_BB a domain refinement of Xmin, namely Xmin_BB D Xmin.

- Propositional (P): One or more arguments are dropped, e.g., Layers (L1) → Layers. We call Layers a propositional abstraction of Layers(L1), namely Layers

P Layers(L1). Conversely, Layers(L1) is a propositional refinement of Layers, namely Layers(L1) P Layers.

Let use consider the following example: (Height(H)) and (Dimension). In this case there is no abstraction/refinement operation that makes those first order terms equivalent. However, consequent applications of propositional and predicate abstraction operations make the two terms equivalent: Height (X) P Height Pd Dimension. Then, the key idea is to use abstractions/refinements as tree edit distance operations in order to estimate the similarity of two tree structures. Tree edit distance is the minimum number of tree edit operations, namely node insertion, deletion, replacement, required to transform one tree to another (Valiente, 2002). We want to: (i) minimize the editing cost, i.e., computation of the minimal cost composition of abstractions/refinements, (ii) allow only those tree edit operations that have their abstraction theoretic counterparts. Thus, as an initial hypothesis (to be further analyzed), we assign the same unit cost to all operations that have their abstraction theoretic counterparts, while operations not allowed by definition of abstractions/refinements are assigned an infinite cost.

Finally, the global similarity between two trees is computed as follows:

TreeSimn Cost

size of T1, si

i ii S= !

"#$

1min

max( zze of T2)

where, S is the set of allowed tree edit operations, ni is the number of i-th operations necessary to convert one tree into the other, Costi is the cost of the i-th operation. For the example in Figure 5, TreeSim would be 0.58. Then, based on some predefined threshold (e.g., 0.5) it is decided whether the trees under consideration are similar enough, namely if TreeSim is lower than the threshold, those trees are considered as not similar. If the similarity score exceeds a given threshold, the correspondences connecting the nodes of the term trees are further used for data translation. 4.3 Preliminary Results The approximate structure preserving semantic matching algorithm has been implemented in Java (Giunchiglia et al, 2007a). As the work in (Avesani et al, 2005, Giunchiglia et al, 2007c) indicates, it takes around one year to build a large scale evaluation dataset. We have already started the process of building such a dataset for the SDI/GIS domain and extensive evaluation constitutes one of the key directions of our future work. Here, we only report our preliminary evaluation results based on the motivating example of Figure 5 and ca. 50 of similar test cases we have acquired so far. The reference results for these problems were established manually. Then, the results computed by our solution have been compared with the reference results. As match quality measure we have used F-measure. It varies in the [0-1] range. The version computed here is the harmonic mean of precision (the measure of correctness) and recall (the measure of completeness), so that to each of these two measures was given equal importance (Euzenat and Shvaiko, 2007). While computing F-measure we considered only if the trees match globally. Based on our previous experience in (Giunchiglia et al, 2007a) we used here a cut-off threshold of 0.5. As a performance measure we have used time. It estimates how fast our solution when matching trees fully automatically. All these tests have been performed on a standard laptop: Core Duo CPU - 2Hz, with 2 GB of RAM, with the Windows Vista operating system, and with no applications running but a single matching system. The quantity of main memory used by algorithm during matching did not rise more than 3Mb higher than the standby level. For the example of Figure 5, the matching algorithm identified 11 node-to-node correspondences, namely 7 equivalence and 4 abstraction/refinement relations. These were further aggregated into a similarity score of 0.58, which in turn is higher than the selected cut-off threshold of 0.5, and, therefore, the two trees globally

match as expected by human inspection. For the ca. 50 test cases we ran, we have obtained an average Precision of 0.98, an average Recall of 0.82 and an average F-measure of 0.71. The average execution time was 46ms. These results look encouraging, especially for what concerns the execution time – that if confirmed by more extensive evaluation – would allow for a run-time usage of the semantic matching approach. In any case, further extensive large-scale evaluation is needed. 5 CONCLUSIONS We have presented a semantic heterogeneity problem scenario in SDI, which includes geo-data sharing through geo-services provided by the GIS agencies and the formalization of a map service request using a particular coordination language, i.e. LCC, for the description of he interactions of the involved peers. The scenario is based on the current organizational model for the distributed GIS Agency infrastructure of Trentino, Italy. We then discussed an automatic approximate Structure Preserving Semantic Matching (SPSM) algorithm used as a solution to the semantic heterogeneity problem between different implementations of the required geo-services. We applied the matching algorithm to the map web service matching scenario. We have evaluated our solution on a limited number of test cases composed of ca. 50 web services signatures (mapped into trees) that are manual alterations of a few (ca. 10) original web services signatures. The original web services were built using public services from ESRI ArcWeb Services. The evaluation results look promising, especially with reference to the efficiency indicators. Currently, the matching solution is elementary in the sense that it provides means to match web services available in the LCC interaction models. However, to run an interaction model, a peer should know which interaction model it wants to execute and with which peers it will be interacting. The ultimate goal is to provide a unifying framework based on interaction models that are mobile among peers, being a mechanism for web service composition, capable of capturing (local) peers’ semantics emerging from their interactions and enabling ad hoc peer coalition formation as required by hastily formed networks (Denning (2006)). In turn, future work on the approximate SPSM proceeds at least in the following directions: (i) conducting extensive and comparative evaluation, including other kind of GIS

web services like the ones available from OGC specifications (http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards) and GRASS package (http://geobrain.laits.gmu.edu:8099/webservices/grass/Grass_Webservices.html),

(ii) extending the matching approach for dealing with fully-fledged GIS ontologies like the ones provided by INSPIRE directive,

(iii) incorporating domain specific preferences in order to drive approximation, thus allowing/prohibiting certain kinds of approximation (e.g not approximating vector maps with raster maps, although these are both maps), and

(iv) use different kind of thesaurus like the multilingual GEMET (http://www.eionet.europa.eu/gemet) GIS thesaurus to support multilingual matching.

ACKNOLEDGEMENTS We are grateful to Fausto Giunchiglia, Mikalai Yatskevich, Paolo Besana, June Pane and Fiona McNeil for many fruitful discussions on the structure preserving semantic matching. This work has been supported by the FP6 OpenKnowledge project (European Project FP6-027253, http://www.openk.org). REFERENCES Avesani, P., Giunchiglia, F. and Yatskevich, M. (2005). “A large scale taxonomy

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