Massive ocean data acquired by various observing platforms and sensors poses new challenges to data management and utilization. Typically, it is difficult to find the desired data from the large amount of datasets efficiently and effectively. Most of existing methods for data discovery are based on the keyword retrieval or direct semantic reasoning, and they are either limited in data access rate or do not take the time cost into account. In this paper, we creatively design and implement a novel system to alleviate the problem by introducing semantics with ontologies, which is referred to as Data Ontology and List-Based Publishing (DOLP). Specifically, we mainly improve the ocean data services in the following three aspects. First, we propose a unified semantic model called OEDO (Ocean Environmental Data Ontology) to represent heterogeneous ocean data by metadata and to be published as data services. Second, we propose an optimized quick service query list (QSQL) data structure for storing the pre-inferred semantically related services, and reducing the service querying time. Third, we propose two algorithms for optimizing QSQL hierarchically and horizontally, respectively, which aim to extend the semantics relationships of the data service and improve the data access rate. Experimental results prove that DOLP outperforms the benchmark methods. First, our QSQL-based data discovery methods obtain a higher recall rate than the keyword-based method, and are faster than the traditional semantic method based on direct reasoning. Second, DOLP can handle more complex semantic relationships than the existing methods.

Skyline group, also named as combinational skyline or group-based skyline, has attracted more attention recently. The concept of skyline groups is proposed to address the problem in the inadequacy of the traditional skyline to answer queries that need to analyze not only individual points but also groups of points. Skyline group algorithms aim at finding groups of points that are not dominated by any other same-size groups. Although two types of dominance relationship exist between the groups defined in existing works, they have not been compared systematically under the same experimental framework. Thus, practitioners face difficulty in selecting an appropriate definition. Furthermore, the experimental evaluation in most existing works features a weakness, that is, studies only experimented on small data sets or large data sets with small dimensions. For comprehensive comparisons of the two types of definition and existing algorithms, we evaluate each algorithm in terms of time and space on various synthetic and real data sets. We reveal the characteristics of existing algorithms and provide guidelines on selecting algorithms for different situations.