A Toponym Resolution Service Following the OGC WPS Standard

In the research field of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a cooperative effort has been undertaken by several international organizations to define standards and specifications for interoperable systems. The Web Processing Service (WPS) is one of the most recent specifications of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). It is designed to standardize the way that GIS calculations are made available to the Internet. We present in this paper a WPS to perform Toponym Resolution. This service defines two geospatial operations. The first operation, getAll, returns all possible geographic descriptions with the requested name ordered by a relevance ranking. The second operation, getMostProbable, filters the result and returns only the most probable geographic description. Furthermore, both operations can be parameterized according to the level of detail needed in the result.