Computing with GML using the OGC Web Processing Service
Jonathan Pilley-UBC, Andy Leung-UBC, David Burggraf-GALDOS SYSTEMS INC.
An early implementation of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Processing Service called the Geospatial Analysis Tool was developed by Galdos Systems in March 2005. The current version 0.3.0 of the WPS is a draft implementation specification of the OGC released in May 2005. The heart of the Geospatial Analysis Tool is its Function Computation Engine (FCE), which can be based on a mathematical software package such as Maple, Mathematica, Matlab, etc. Functions (processes) can be created and advertised by the WPS for the analysis of geospatial information. Examples of such functions are: (1) topology generation; (2) graph routing using real time traffic information; (3) coordinate conversions between ellipsoidal and curvilinear coordinate systems; etc. The input to each function is geospatial data encoded as Geography Markup Language (GML). Computations on GML data will be demonstrated via a WPS interfacing with an OGC Web Feature Service using both Maple and Mathematica as the FCE. It is anticipated that the new WPS will generate significant interest in the Geo-Web community as the WPS provides an interoperable tool for investigative GIS research and has far reaching applications.