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Standards
The RIESGOS project aims to provide reusable software components, so there is a strong focus on using standarized interfaces to allow these components to be easily integrated into existing systems. This page describes the standards used within this project and explains the reasoning for these decisions.
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is a consortium with members from industry, research and academia with the aim to facilitate interoperability in the geospatial technology domain by means of open technical standards. In RIESGOS, we plan to rely on OGC standards in order to ensure interoperability between the different components developed in RIESGOS, but also with external spatial data infrastructures and (geographic) information systems.
A good introduction into Web Services and OGC standards is provided in a tutorial on OGC's Elearning platform.
The core services currently considered in RIESGOS are:
- Web Map Service (WMS): Web Service for providing (rendered) coverage data in image formats, e.g. GeoTIFF.
- Web Feature Service (WFS): Web Service for providing vector data, e.g. streets or points of interest, in common GIS formats, e.g. Geography Markup Language or GeoJSON.
- Web Processing Service (WPS): Web Service for providing geoprocessing functionality in the Web.
The OGC Web Processing Service (WPS) provides a common interface for exposing geoprocessing functionality as Web Services, ranging from simple GIS operators like buffering lines up to complex environmental models. In RIESGOS, we intend to use the WPS standard as a basis for providing Web Services for the different hazard simulation and risk assessment models. Furthermore, the WPS allows to orchestrate a number of services into a workflow (synonym to pipeline).
The official website containing the standard can be found here.
As part of the general OGC tutorial, a useful first step introduction is given as part of this tutorial.
The implementation provided by 52°North is available as Open Source on GitHub. More background information is provided at 52°North's WPS website, including a description how to set up a WPS server.
There are also a lot of research papers on Web Based Geoprocessing. A good starting point may be the Special Issue of the Computers & Geosciences journal Towards a Geoprocessing Web.