Information Services for Grid/Web Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Based Geospatial Applications

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) presents data-intensive environment for acquiring, processing and sharing geo-data among interested parties. In order to serve geographical information to users in such environment, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles have gained great importance. In SOA-based systems, Information Services support the discovery and handling of these geospatial services. Some options for Information Services in SOA-based GIS systems include a) the Open GIS Consortium (OGC) Web Registry Service (WRS) and b) the Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI). WRS is an OGC standard to discover/publish service information of geospatial services. It presents a domain-specific registry capability for geospatial information. UDDI is domain-independent standardized method for publishing/discovering information about Web Services. As it is WS-Interoperability (WS-I) compatible, UDDI has the advantage being interoperable with most existing Grid/Web Service standards. This study presents an approach combining domain-specific registry capabilities of WRS and WS-I compatible UDDI Specifications. We extend UDDI Information Model to support geospatial services. Our approach supports not only quasi-static, stateless metadata, but also more extensive metadata requirements of rich interacting systems. The implementation of our approach is being used to support a GIS workflow system which is a part of NASA Solid Earth Virtual Observatory (SERVO) Grid project.