A client for distributed geo-processing and workflow design

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) web processing service interface specification provides a means to perform web-based processes on distributed geodata and to produce thereby web-based geoinformation. However, the complexity of geodata often requires multiple processing steps. These complex scenarios can be addressed by chaining multiple web processing services to a geo-processing workflow. The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) as the de-facto standard will be used for these workflows. The special nature of standardised OGC web services has to be taken into account for modelling these workflows. A client is missing which allows the integration of existing OGC web services without specifying additional descriptions such as WSDL documents for all participants in BPEL workflows and thereby bridging the OGC and ‘mainstream’ IT world. This leverages the fully web-based integration of distributed OGC services and data. These facts were the starting point for this study to build a client, which is able to model and execute BPEL-based workflows and to integrate multiple standardised and web-based data and processing services. The applicability of the client for web-based information integration will be demonstrated for a real-time risk management scenario in the context of location-based services.