OGC Web Processing Service: Another Middleware Solution of Interoperability and Geoprocessing
Xiaoyuan Geng and Peter Schut-AGRICULTURE AND AGRI-FOOD CANADA
Two of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) objectives are to promote the use of "interoperable geoprocessing" and to synchronize "geoprocessing technology" with Information Technology standards such as HTTP, open systems, distributed processing etc. In an Internet/Intranet environment, middleware has been identified as a bridge between the general users and the backend data or system. Through a middleware client, a general user or citizen should not face more requirements other than click few links to archive the outputs otherwise to be done by a professional geospatial specialist. A newly proposed Web Processing Service OGC specification is expected to provide common ground to the organizations and institutions who plan to develop the middleware components for web based geospatial processing such as geometry operations, geospatial computation, and mathematic modelling. Follow the WPS implementation specification, we have developed few prototype WPSs by leveraging other open source software such as Apache/Tomcat web server, J2EE Java/Servlet, PHP, Python etc. The outputs of the implementation and testing will provide critical information to improve the WPS specification and schema. Through the WPS clients, middleware and backend methods, interoperable and distributed geoprocessing is realized. The implemented WPSs can be published, discovered, and accessed through OGC web registry service or UDDI registry.