OWS-4 Geo Processing Workflow (GPW)

The OGC community has accumulated a significant body of knowledge in designing, building and operating Web Services. The full potential of Web Services as an integration framework will be achieved only when applications and business processes are able to integrate their complex interactions by using a standard process integration approach. The OASIS Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL-WS or BPEL) formally describes a business process that will take place across Web Services in such a way that any cooperating entity can perform one or more steps in the process the same way. OGC’s Geo-Processing Workflow (GPW) activities develop and demonstrate how to interconnect geoprocesses through publish-find-bind and the use of BPEL to meet workflow requirements, resulting in the creation of valued-added enterprise systems that demonstrate the power of interoperability and service-oriented architectures.

Earlier OWS activities started investigating geo-processing workflows, in particular the OWS-2 Common Architecture work used BPEL and WSDL to implement, test and demonstrate OGC Web Services for Image Handling and Decision Support; there, initiative participants were able to chain several services using the Oracle BPEL product. It was recognized in the subsequent initiative (OWS-3) that workflows were not fully engaged. Therefore, there was a desire to focus on workflows in OWS-4, and in particular coordinate with specific thematic topics. Further, it was recognized that modifications to existing specifications as well as creation of new specifications might be needed to support robust and extensible service chaining. For example, many OGC services logically fit at the end of a service chain where operations such as getMap, and getFeature return the results of a geospatial process. Support for transactions, portrayal and additional processing services are needed to create more comprehensive and robust process chains. In OWS-4, transactional capability was added to the WCS and explored further with the WFS. Support for temporal data was investigated in both the WCS and WFS. Finally new processing services were built by wrapping an existing image handling toolkit behind a Web Processing Service (WPS).

Participants:

• Galdos
• George Mason Univ.
• Interactive Instruments
• Intergraph
• ITC
• ITT
• Laser-Scan
• LizardTech
• PCI-Geomatics
• SAIC

Results:

• Interoperability Reports and Change Request
  • Workflow Architecture IPR
  • WPS Profile IPR
  • WFS on Oracle 10G IPR (temp/topo)
  • Topology Quality Assessment IPR
  • AIXM Mapping IPR
  • Schema Tailoring IPR
  • GML App Schema IPR – MSDS
  • GML AS IPR–GGMA D2 Aero
  • WCS CR (JPIP)
• Implementations
  • BPEL workflow engine
  • WPS for geo-processing
  • WFS-T, Temporal, FE,GZIP
  • Data Aggregation Service
  • Schema Assembly tool updates
  • Topology Quality Geo-processing Service
  • WCS-JPIP client
  • WCS-JPIP (GMLJP2)
  • WCPS
  • WCS-T ingest of SWE data service chain
  • GML App Schemas & UML Models (NSG Feature Catalog, MSDS, GGMA)
  • MSD3 as GML Prototype