Automatic Composition of Geospatial Web Service

Abstract

The geoprocessing algorithm provided by geospatial services may handle only a tiny part of the overall geoprocessing or may be a large aggregated processing. In both situations, the service should be well defined, have clear input and output requirements, and be independently executable. Such services can be chained to construct different geoprocessing workflows (or service chains) for geospatial knowledge discovery. In a distributed data and information environment such as the World Wide Web, there are many independent data and service providers. A complex geoprocessing workflow may be scattered among multiple service providers. Therefore, standards for publishing, finding, binding, and execution of services are needed. By following the standards for interfaces, interoperability of different software systems is achieved. Web services developed by different organizations can then be combined to fulfill users’ requests. Through the OWS testbeds, OGC has been developing a series of interface specifications under the OGC Abstract Service Architecture.