Extended FRAG-BASE schema-matching method for multi-version open GIS Web services retrieval

The OGC Web Service (OWS) schemas have the characteristics of a complex element structure, are distributed and large scale, have differences in element naming, and are available in different versions. Applying conventional matching approaches may lead to not only poor quality, but also bad performance. In this article, the OWS schema file decomposition, fragment presentation, fragment identification, fragment element match, and combination of match results are developed based on the extended FRAG-BASE (fragment-based) schema-matching method. Different versions of Web Feature Service (WFS) and Web Coverage Service (WCS) schema-matching experiments show that the average recall of the extended FRAG-BASE matching for the schemas is above 80%, the average precision reaches 90%, the average overall achieves 85%, and the matching efficiency increases by 50% as compared with that of the COMA and CONTEXT matcher. The multi-version WFS retrieval under the Antarctic Spatial Data Infrastructure (AntSDI) data service environment demonstrates the feasibility and superiority of the extended FRAG-BASE method.