Abstract: For the lack of semantic description and implicit relational reasoning ability of metadata, users can't obtain the high-matching land cover information and the number of related resources retrieved is small. This paper proposes the land cover semantic catalogue service by adding ontology reasoning mechanism to the OGC catalogue service, and then designs the land cover metadata model based on the national geographic information metadata standard,builds the ontology model of land cover metadata based on it. Then it uses OWL to formalize the ontology model, and implements the semantic catalogue service of surface coverage using Java. Experiments show that the ontology can effectively improve the recall and precision of surface coverage resources.

Key words: land cover, metadata, ontology, service, sharing