Orchestration of Geospatial Processes with RichWPS - a Practical Demonstration

Distributed geospatial data and services can be used to form Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). Current technological developments enable SDI to process large amounts of geospatial data. In this context, Web Processing Services (WPS) can be used as an open interface standard for accessing and executing geospatial processes. Since many SDI are based on Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), the orchestration of services is enabled by composing existing services. The results are higher services, e.g. complex geospatial applications. The RichWPS research project focuses on analysing and providing practical approaches of web service orchestration. For this, software components are developed to build a modular orchestration environment. Real-life examples of geospatial processing are analysed and divided into simpler, reusable sub-processes. Using the RichWPS environment, the sub-processes are implemented and arranged as workflow models, which are deployed to an extended WPS server and interpreted by its orchestration engine. This enables workflows to be executed by WPS clients. This paper presents the RichWPS environment and one of the analysed real-life scenarios. The example scenario “Macrophyte Assessment” contains the assessment of water plants in order to report on the water’s qualitative status. This meets requirements of the Water Framework Directive (WFD) and the Marine Strategy Framework Directive (MSFD) of the European Union. The scenario is analysed in order to identify elementary processes. With the use of RichWPS components these processes are orchestrated to form an executable assessment procedure.