Semantically-assisted geospatial workflow design
Gobe Hobona, David Fairbairn, Philip James · 2007
The value of service oriented architectures has been demonstrated in several studies. A key aspect of the advantage of web services is their orchestration into complex business workflows. The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Systems (OASIS) has recently approved an industry-wide standard for workflow specification, the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), a member of OASIS, has adopted BPEL for its series of interoperability experiments. This paper presents a study concerned with the use of ontology in assisting geospatial web service orchestration. A methodology for calculating the degree of suitability of various candidate workflows is proposed. The implementation of a prototype plug-in for Eclipse-based BPEL editors is discussed. The proposed system presents candidate workflows based on semantic descriptions of feature, coverage and processing services. An evaluation of the system, based on a workflow involving a variety of geospatial web services is also presented.