Abstract
Modern Web based GIS systems have responded significantly to semantic Web technology as it offers opportunities to overcome interoperability and integration problems. There are abundant needs especially for the systems intending to provide more than just a map with basic geographical information. More sophisticated systems can offer more than navigation services and can integrate with several data sources, thereby providing a richer, wider and highly usable information service to be used in business, governmental and different life domains. Search is an essential part of any GIS system because of the huge amount of data representing different meanings that are stored in one or distributed data sources. A model is presented which focuses on searching for geospatial information to answer query semantics rather than query syntax. This model used the most recent and approved standards among the semantic Web communities, and was applied on TerraFly a GIS system. Since ranking is a critical factor in measuring the quality of any search engine, a ranking algorithm is also proposed and evaluated.