Computers & Geosciences 47 (2012) 312

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The Geoprocessing Web

Peisheng Zhao a,n, Theodor Foerster b, Peng Yue c
a
Center for Spatial Information Science and Systems, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, MSN 6E1 Fairfax, VA 22030, USA
b
Institute for Geoinformatics, University of Muenster, Weseler Strasse 253, 48151 Muenster, Germany
c
State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, 129 Luoyu Road, Wuhan 430079, China

a r t i c l e i n f o abstract

Article history: As Web services technology has matured in recent years, an increasing amount of geospatial resources
Received 23 February 2012 and processing functions are available in the form of online Web services. Consequently, effective and
Received in revised form efcient data processing methods for geospatial information extraction and knowledge discovery over
19 April 2012
the Web are a major challenge for research and industry. The Geoprocessing Web, which consists of
Accepted 21 April 2012
light-weight protocols, crowd-sourcing capability, and the capability to process real-time geospatial
Available online 30 April 2012
data sources provided by sensors, enables distributed, interoperable and collaborative processing of
Keywords: geospatial data for information and knowledge discovery. This paper provides a comprehensive
Geoprocessing Web overview about the state-of-the-art architecture and technologies, and the most recent developments
Geospatial Web service
in the Geoprocessing Web.
Web processing service
& 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Real-time geospatial information
Volunteered geographic information
Semantic web

1. Introduction analysis and application of geospatial data very expensive and time-
consuming. Moreover, these resources are locked in silos and cannot
With the advancement of Earth observing and sensing technolo- be shared and integrated across organizations and communities. As a
gies, the volume of geoscientic data has increased tremendously in result, data analysis becomes a privilege owned by some well-
the past decade and is expected to keep growing continuously. This educated domain-specic users, and much data may not been
increasing is reected by the anticipated operating satellite systems analyzed sufciently. These traditional methods of analyzing data
acquiring high-resolution remote-sensing data or by novel crowd- fall far short of todays increased demands for geospatial information
sourcing systems which make in-situ data available and support and knowledge.
citizens as scientists. For example, the National Aeronautics and Interoperability and accessibility of geoprocessing resources
Space Administration (NASA)s Earth Observing System (EOS) satel- improve the application of geospatial data in various domains and
lites alone collect 1000 terabytes annually (Clery and Voss, 2005). help to increase the geospatial knowledge available to society.
These collected data are diverse regarding their spatial and temporal This interoperability is achieved by common standards whereas
properties as well their quality. As more information and knowledge accessibility to particular resources is enabled by the Web. Both
is transformed from geospatial data, their value increases. While aspects are supported by Web services technology, which has
millions of people across the world are interacting with geospatial matured in recent years. Web-based distributed geospatial com-
data via online tools such as virtual globes (Nature, 2006), geospatial puting and large networks of collaborating applications is the
exploration in existing applications is limited to data sharing and next step in the evolution of geoprocessing (Kiehle et al., 2007).
viewing. The integration of different data sources by the means of To address the demands of geoprocessing in distributed environ-
Web-based geoprocessing to acquire further information has not yet ments like the Web, the combination of conventional analysis
been explored thoroughly. Instead, users spend a lot of time on functions and advanced computing technologies requires new
installing and learning a variety of software on local machines, technical infrastructure, domain-specic models and method-
searching for and collecting the geospatial data from a variety of ologies to support advanced data-mining tools and online
sources, and preprocessing and analyzing the data on local machines. community collaborations (Nature, 2008). The Geoprocessing
This everything-locally-owned-and-operated paradigm makes the Web provides architecture, standards and tools to meet these
requirements. Some are Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA),
light-weight protocols, crowd-sourcing capability and the cap-
n
Corresponding author. Tel.: 1 301 614 5509; fax: 1 703 993 6127. ability to process and deliver real-time geospatial data provided
E-mail address: pzhao@[Link] (P. Zhao). by sensors. The Geoprocessing Web is changing the way in which

0098-3004/$ - see front matter & 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
[Link]
4 P. Zhao et al. / Computers & Geosciences 47 (2012) 312

geospatial applications and systems are designed, developed and (3) Distributed object
deployed. When the Component-Based Software Engineering principle is
This article provides an overview of the current-state-of-the-art applied, geoprocessing functions can be provided by different
of the Geoprocessing Web. Section 2 documents the existing software vendors by following the interoperable Application
approaches and achievements of Web-based geoprocessing. Based Programming Interface (API). These functional components can
on this analysis, the concept and framework of the Geoprocessing be assembled to accomplish a complex geoprocessing task, even
Web is described in Section 3. Section 4 discusses the issues and though they may be provided by different software packages.
developments towards the establishment of the Geoprocessing There are three major distributed object-oriented middleware
Web. Section 5 introduces some operational Web-based geoproces- frameworks for developing enterprise-scale component-based
sing systems and discusses the technology readiness of the Geo- applications, namely the Object Management Group (OMG)s
processing Web. Conclusions are given in Section 6. Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA), Micro-
softs Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM), and Suns
Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs) (Tsou and Butteneld, 2002; Preston
2. Existing approaches for geoprocessing et al., 2003). The geoprocessing functions implemented in these
frameworks are technology-specic, and it is difcult to migrate
Geoprocessing is an operation used to manipulate spatial data. from one framework to another.
According to the International Organization for Standardization (4) Web services
(ISO) 19119 specication (ISO, 2005), common geoprocessing SOA provides an interoperable computing infrastructure for
includes spatial processing (e.g., network analysis and coordinate conducting advanced distributed geoprocessing tasks. These
transformation), thematic processing (e.g., classication and geocod- tasks use Web protocols and formats encoded in the eXten-
ing), temporal processing (e.g., change detection and temporal sible Markup Language (XML) (Yang and Raskin, 2009). In the
subsetting), and metadata processing (e.g., geographic annotation context of SOA, geoprocessing functions are provided as
and statistical calculation). The development of the geoprocessing loosely-coupled Web services, and coordinated to execute
paradigm is greatly inuenced by the advances in information complex geoprocessing tasks collaboratively as workows.
technology. Existing geoprocessing paradigms can be classied into The research and development on new geoprocessing infra-
four types (Orfali et al., 1999; Tsou and Butteneld, 2002; Chang and structures in the past several years have been occupied
Park, 2006; Zhao et al., 2006; Yue et al., 2010b), as shown in Fig. 1: predominantly with the employment of technology for
improving discovery, performance, and workows (Zhao
(1) Standalone environment et al., 2006; Brauner et al., 2009; Yang et al., 2010). It is,
Traditional geoprocessing applications are performed in a therefore, necessary to set up a research agenda clarifying the
standalone environment like a desktop computer. Data sto- promise of geoprocessing over the Web. This is the aim of the
rage, visualization, and processing are tightly coupled in a Geoprocesssing Web, as discussed in the next section.
software repository. Thus, geospatial users often access, trans-
form, and visualize data using one software package.
(2) Client/server
Data storage and processing functions are performed at the 3. The Geoprocessing Web
remote servers, while data presentation functions are per-
formed by local clients such as Web browsers (Abel et al., 3.1. Denition
1998). In terms of the assignment of functions to the client
and the server, the client and server can be classied respec- As SOA is emerging as the basis for distributed computing and
tively as thin/thick clients and light/heavy servers (Chang and an interoperable framework of collaborating applications, an
Park, 2006). For example, some data manipulation functions can increasing amount of geospatial processing functions and appli-
be added on the thin client side to improve the performance of cations are built upon it. Users can collect, analyze and derive
user interactions. Some simple geoprocessing functions can be geospatial data, information, and knowledge over the Web.
executed at the thick client side, while complex data processing The Geoprocessing Web covers the conceptual, methodological,
is performed at the server side. technical, and managerial issues that facilitate distributed and

Traditional Geoprocessing Client/Server Geoprocessing Distributed Object Geoprocessing

Geoprocessing API Thin/Thick Client CORBA DCOM

Geoprocessing
Light/Heavy Server EJB
Library

Distributed Collaborative Geoprocessing

Web Services Web 2.0

Grid/Cloud
Semantic Web
Computing

Fig. 1. The evolution of Geoprocessing Web.

 P. Zhao et al. / Computers & Geosciences 47 (2012) 312 5

collaborative geoprocessing over the Web. The Geoprocessing from sensors, which provide their data through services speci-
Web allows geospatial data to be processed in real time for ed by Sensor Web Enablement (Broring et al., 2011).
creating value-added information. In particular, the Geoproces-  Separation of concerns
sing Web has the following distinguishing characteristics: Through Web Service technology, different roles in service
provision and user access can be identied. Besides the data
 Interoperability providers, enterprises can start to host geoprocessing services
Geoprocessing services with syntactic and semantic descrip- to provide specic analysis functionality, which the users can
tions are machine-to-machine as well as machine-to-human access from existing applications. With the advent of cloud
discoverable and executable through standard protocols. Cli- computing, this separation has become even more diverse,
ents can thus perform both single and sequences geoproces- given the different levels of cloud provision: Infrastructure as a
sing functions compiled as workows. An example of Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service.
interoperability is the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
Web Processing Service (WPS) interface (Foerster et al., When combined with knowledge representation techniques,
2011b). geoprocessing models can be established with the semantics of
 Light-weight protocols geoprocessing services and chains, thus minimizing or eliminat-
For scalability as well as for usability and acceptance in the ing human intervention in the use of the Geoprocessing Web. The
developer community, light-weight protocols are required. open access to knowledge and services allows wide participation
Being light weight, the protocols are easy to be adopted in of citizens in educational and scientic activities. The individuals
existing and new applications. Examples of such protocols are can also share their algorithms as services, which could be deployed
the REST-based (Foerster et al., 2011a) and lightweight on a cloud computing platform. The extension of utilization and
exchange formats such as JSON. contribution of geoprocessing services and models in the educa-
 Collaboration tional sector or by citizens at large offers great potential to
Data, information and knowledge from different users or contribute, tag, rate, and comment on geoprocessing components
communities can be explored and integrated to promote and models, thus bringing social features to the Geoprocessing Web.
geoprocessing functionalities in an open environment.
 Distribution of resources 3.2. Framework
Using the SOA principles, service providers can distribute their
resources in terms of hardware, operating systems, software Fig. 2 illustrates a three-layer framework of the Geoprocessing
environments and geographic location. Users can retrieve Web. The rst layer is the geoprocessing resource layer that
these sources through an interoperable access layer, which is provides sensors, geospatial data, and geoprocessing facilities. The
based on common network protocols and data exchange second layer is the management platform aimed to provide basic
formats. utilities to manage geospatial data, services, and models. In parti-
 Real-time cular, the basic utilities include some services for the retrieval,
Users and providers of the Geoprocessing Web can process process, and visualization of geospatial data; the sensor services
most current data in real-time. Real-time data stems mostly focuses on discovery of and accessing to sensor observations, as

Users

User Management
Geoprocessing Portal
Geoprocessing
Workbench

Interactive Data, Service, and

Geoprocessing Model Model Discovery and
Development Geoprocessing
Geospatial Standards

Retrieval
Modeling and
Application
Security & Privacy

Model Registration Peer-Review & Platform

Collaboration

Catalogue Service Inference Engine Workflow Engine

Data, Service,
and Model
Publishing
Manager

Visualization Model/Workflow Geospatial

Knowledge
Service Warehouse Service Data, Service,
and Model
Management
Geospatial Data Geoprocessing Platform
Sensor Service Service Service

Geoprocessing
Geospatial Geoprocessing Resources
Sensors
Data facilities

Fig. 2. Framework for the Geoprocessing Web (revised from Yue et al., 2010b).
6 P. Zhao et al. / Computers & Geosciences 47 (2012) 312

well as receiving alerts and planning sensor tasks; the geoproces- development of geoprocessing middleware and services on top of
sing model and workow management utilities are for process SDI or Cyberinfrastructure. Both SDI and Cyberinfrastructure can
chaining; the catalogue service is used to locate geoprocessing support the Geoprocessing Web by providing the underlying
services or models; the inference engines are required for a technical distributed infrastructures. The unique emphasis of the
semantic match when needed; and the knowledge services provide Geoprocesing Web is the share and access of geoprocessing utilities
geoprocessing knowledge, such as geospatial ontologies, rules, and from the perspectives of communication, collaboration, and parti-
geospatial process models, to support the public in learning and cipation. It is essential for the Geoprocessing Web to meet the
performing geoprocessing tasks. In the third layer, a workbench or needs on information extraction and knowledge discovery in the
portal facilitates users to discover and understand geospatial geospatial information infrastructure.
resources, and develop geoprocessing models and applications.
Geoprocessing models, after going through a collaborative peer 3.5. Example scenario
review, can be registered in the model warehouse as a type of
knowledge. The Security and Privacy across three layers ensures the Using the Geoprocessing Web, an example scenario for wildre
resource sharing rules and conditions for different types of users. prediction can be described as follows. Assume a disaster manager,
Service-oriented applications can increase individual and col- John, wants to know the probability of having (a) wildre(s) the
lective scientic productivity by making powerful information next day in an area of interest. He chooses a geoprocessing service
tools available to scientists, and allowing widespread automation that is rated 5 stars by the scientic community for its high quality.
of distributed data analysis and computation (Foster, 2005). The The service uses the input data of weather prediction and land
framework adopts the service-oriented view in which each cover/use types to predict (a) wildre(s). To provide the input
component is developed as services following standardized inter- weather data for the next day, weather data from remote sensors,
faces and protocols. Standards enable the interoperability of managed by the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration
service components, support the easy integration of distributed (NOAA), are observed and fed into the weather forecast service to
components, and ensure the components being accessible by the predict the weather for the next day. The remote sensing data
large public. The OGC standards on sensor services, data services, observed by NASA can be fed into the land classication service to
processing services, portrayal services, registry/catalogue services, nd the land cover/use types. Using the weather predictions and
and chaining services are being widely used. The development of land cover/use types, the wildre prediction service can then
interoperable and distributed service components enables the predict the probability of having wildre(s) in the area of interest.
openness, growth, and evolution of the Geoprocessing Web. Thus, different organizations can collaborate on wildre prediction
using a coordinated service chain.
3.3. Relations to Web, and Geospatial Web

The Web is dened as a science on how decentralized 4. Developments of the Geoprocessing Web
information structures can serve scientic, representational, and
communicational requirements (Berners-Lee et al., 2006a). The Based on the characteristics of the Geoprocessing Web, the
core components of the Web are identication of resources, current developments of the Geoprocessing Web are grouped as
representation of resource state, and the protocols that support data, geocomputing, geoprocessing services, service orchestration,
the interaction between agents and resources in the space and geospatial semantics.
(Jacobs and Walsh, 2004). Web-related research has largely
focused on information retrieval and routing (Berners-Lee et al., 4.1. Data
2006b). Work on geospatial information retrieval over the Web
inspires the research on the Geospatial Web (Scharl and The privacy, security, and access of geospatial data are very
Tochtermann, 2007). Moving focus from geospatial data to geo- important for data dissemination in the networking environment.
processing resources, the Geoprocessing Web allows service To track and manage access and restriction of geospatial data, data
providers to move their geoprocessing functionality as a kind of rights management is the primary issue. Standards are required to
resources into the Web. The conventional Web can be regarded as enable data providers to use well-understood and common mechan-
an information space in which information can be published, isms to manage intellectual property rights cross organizations. The
accessed, and retrieved, while the Geoprocessing Web empha- OGC Geospatial Digital Management (GeoDRM) working group has
sizes geoprocessing activities on changing information, and thus dened a reference model to provide a trusted framework and rights
can be regarded as an action space. languages for the management of digital rights of in the area of
geospatial data and services (Vowles, 2006). Based on the available
3.4. Web-based geoprocessing in SDIs and cyberinfrastructure digital licensing infrastructure, (Bishr et al., 2007) proposed the
general components of the GeoDRM framework with a focus on the
Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) is a distributed infrastructure technical aspects. The Infrastructure for Spatial Information in
originally focusing on data acquisition, distribution, and usage Europe (INSPIRE) is using the GeoDRM framework to implement
(Maguire and Longley, 2005). The recent development of SDI is key functionality of the rights management layer (INSPIRE, 2008).
trying to adding geoprocessing capabilities (Friis-Christensen et al., OGC also dened a geo-specic extension to OASIS eXtensible
2007; Kiehle et al., 2007). Cyberinfrastructure aims to combine data Access Control Markup Language, GeoXACML. This extension
resources, network protocols, computing platforms, and computa- includes spatial data types and spatial authorization decision func-
tional services to provide a virtual environment for science and tions to support the declaration and enforcement of access restric-
engineering research and education (Yang, et al., 2010). The devel- tions on geospatial data in a service-based infrastructure (Matheus
opment of grid computing and recent advancement of cloud and Herrmann, 2011). GeoXACML is being widely used to dene and
computing consolidate the development of the SDI and Cyberinfras- enforce expressive and ne grained geospatial authorization rules
tructure, and demonstrate the benets of outsourcing of computing and access rights (Lin et al., 2009; Herrmann, 2010).
tasks on the Web, such as high availability. Provenance records the processing history of a data product.
The concept of the Geoprocesing Web advocates the importance It is important for users to discover dependencies among data and
of geocomputation in the network environment, and suggests the services, repeat the process of derivation of data products, and
 P. Zhao et al. / Computers & Geosciences 47 (2012) 312 7

make decisions about the quality of derived data products (Foster, information infrastructure enabled by Cloud Computing are the
2005). In the ISO 19115 Geospatial information Metadata standard, illusion of innite computing resources available on demand, the
provenance is regarded as part of the metadata recording the events elimination of an up-front commitment by cloud users, and the
or source data used in constructing the data, and relevant data quality ability to pay for use of computing resources on a short-term basis
(ISO, 2003). In a service-oriented environment, geospatial data as needed (Armbrust et al., 2009). A cloud could be public or private,
provenance records the data processing history, including source depending on the deployment approach. A public cloud is available
data, transformation functionalities, workow, parameters, and date to the public, while a private cloud is used inside an organization.
and time (Yue et al., 2011). For example, the OGC WPS species an Major categories of Cloud Computing include Infrastructure as a
element, lineage, to get a complete copy of data inputs and output Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service
denitions. Kepler, a scientic workow system, provides a generic (SaaS) (NIST, 2009), depending on the capabilities provided. Provid-
provenance framework to trace workow execution. It has been ing geoprocessing functions in Cloud Computing platforms can bring
applied in the geological and biological domains (Altintas et al., 2006; scalable, on-demand, and cost-effective geoprocessing services to
Anand et al., 2010). To promote provenance information with geospatial users (Gong et al., 2010). The development of both SDI
semantics, provenance ontologies have been dened and used in and Cyberinfrastructure can benet from the use of cloud comput-
the OGC Catalogue Service for Web (CS/W) for registration and query ing technologies (Schaffer et al., 2010; Yang et al., 2010, 2011;
of semantic provenance (Wang et al., 2008; Yue et al., 2010a). Baranski et al., 2011).
Access to geospatial data must overcome the heterogeneity of
the data. Standardized open protocols and interfaces allow access to 4.3. Geoprocessing services
distributed and diverse data in a common way. OGC has issued a
series of service specications ranging from data service and Establishing and performing a geoprocessing task over a network
portrayal service to catalogue service, making great progress on began in the 1980s, when clients were able to invoke computations
the use of Web services to publish and access geospatial data. For performed on remote computers. Since the advent of the Web
example, the OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) provides common services, an increasing number of geoprocessing functionalities are
interfaces to access customized multi-dimensional and multi-tem- available and accessible as Web services. The GeoBrain Processing
poral geospatial data as a coverage (Whiteside and Evans, 2008). Web Services, which have been developed using the functionality of
The OGC Web Feature Service (WFS) supports the networked the Geographic Resource Analysis Support System (GRASS)1, provide
interchange of geographical vector data as a feature which is geospatial data management, raster image processing, spatial mod-
encoded in Geographic Markup Language (GML), an extensible eling and analysis, graphic map generation, and data visualization
markup language for support and storage of geographic vector data over the Internet (Li et al., 2010). The Adam Web Services leverage
to meet the requirements of complex spatial analysis (Vretanos, the Algorithm Development and Mining Toolkit (Adam)2 for mining
2010). The OGC Web Map Service (WMS) provides geospatial data remotely sensed and other scientic data dynamically over the
in a common way as a map, which is generally rendered network, such as pattern recognition, image processing and optimi-
dynamically from real geographical data in a spatially referenced zation, and association rule exploration.
pictorial image format such as PNG, GIF, or JPEG (Beaujardiere, For the increasing number of distributed and heterogeneous
2006). The OGC Sensor Observation Service (SOS) provides stan- geoprocessing Web services, common service interfaces and
dardized interfaces for managing deployed sensors and retrieving standardized message encodings are required to support inter-
sensor observation data (Na and Priest, 2007). operable machine-to-machine interactions. OGC has formulated a
WPS specication (Schut, 2007) that provides rules for standar-
4.2. Geocomputing dizing inputs and outputs (requests and responses) for geospatial
processing services. The OGC WPS denes a set of standardized
Geocomputing focuses on the utilization of the theory of interfaces to facilitate the publication and access of geospatial
computation and state-of-the-art High Performance Computing processes over a network. Since its ofcial release as an imple-
(HPC) technologies in spatial analysis. Geocomputing for spatial mentation specication, several communities brought up their
data must consider spatial and temporal properties and the framework. This momentum has been solely created from and by
relations between them. To address the computationally challen- the open source community mainly from 521North, Deegree and
ging demands of geospatial domain, new computational approaches PyWPS. An overview of the current development of OGC WPS is
and computing middleware must be developed to leverage the provided in Fig. 3. The 521North Open Source Initiative3 has
existing theories and technologies with spatial-temporal data (Yang developed open-source software that uses a pluggable architec-
et al., 2011). ture for processes and data encoding to enable the deployment of
In order to ensure that state-of-the-art HPC systems are OGC WPS in a standardized way. Most GRASS GIS functionalities
optimally congured to support geoprocessing, better alignment have been wrapped as OGC WPSs within the 521North WPS
between geoprocessing activities and HPC platforms, such as framework, and are available online for public use (Brauner,
in the design of geoprocessing algorithms for different HPC 2008; Li et al., 2009).
environments, are needed. Theory about the nature of spatial The Quality of Service (QoS) that measures how well a service
computation, such as computability and computational complex- matches customer expectations determines the degree of service
ity, is an important issue. The development and deployment of usage in an open networking environment. In the common model
geoprocessing in the HPC platforms also requires a technological of QoS, the performance, reliability and availability are the major
framework to provide functions such as task scheduling, fault questions in the quality of geoprocessing services (Gao et al., 2009;
tolerance, and data assimilation. There are different types of Foerster et al., 2011b; Moses, 2011). By considering the diverse use
parallel computing such as cluster computing or grid computing requirements, the unique character of spatial data, and QoS related
in the available computing platforms (Chen et al., 2009). constraints on complex geoprocessing, (Onchaga, 2004) denes an
Approaches guiding parallel processing of computationally
intensive geographical analyses are also required (Wang and 1
GRASS GIS, [Link]
Armstrong, 2009). 2
Data Mining and Image Processing Toolkits, [Link]
Cloud Computing is associated with a new paradigm for comput- adam
ing infrastructure (Vaquero et al., 2009). Several new aspects of the 3
521North WPS, [Link]
8 P. Zhao et al. / Computers & Geosciences 47 (2012) 312

chain that is abstractly predened and managed by a workow

engine. The user is aware of all components of the service
chain, but does not have to deal with the execution order or
mediate processing results. But since the user knows all
participating services, he/she is able to view and adjust the
current status of each participating service.
 Opaque chaining
Opaque chaining pattern exposes a service chain as a single
service and hides all details from the user. The user sets all the
required parameters, submits the request, and gets back the
results without knowing that the single service hides a chain,
and what types of services are being used. Essentially, the
single service is responsible for all service coordination.

Fig. 3. Current development of OGC WPS. Typical activities of a service chain include Sequence, Split,
SplitJoin, Choice, Any-Order, Condition, If-Then-Else, Iterate,
Repeat-While, and Repeat-Until. Several orchestration languages
extensible QoS model that covers performance, cost, reliability, are available. The XML Process Denition Language (XPDL) as a
availability, security, reputation, interactive support, location, and Workow Management Coalition (WfMC) workow language
health of services for QoS-aware discovery and composition of (WfMC, 2008), the Yet Another Workow Language (YAWL) as a
geospatial services. Technically, the geoprocessing services are popular open source language (Aalst and Hofstede, 2004) and the
implementation and algorithm specic. Their qualities also depend Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) as
heavily on the complexity of the input data and the processing a popular business workow language (OASIS, 2007) are the most
functions involved. The quality of service outputs is generally relevant and popular. Since WS-BPEL provides rich vocabulary
measured by their completeness, logical consistency, positional and control structure, and is widely supported by commercial
accuracy, temporal accuracy, and thematic accuracy (ISO, 2002). vendors and open-source communities, it is becoming the
(Donaubauer et al., 2008) proposed to use Geographic Markup de-facto standard for describing the control logic required to
Language (GML) and ISO 19139 to dynamically generate quality coordinate those Web services participating in a processing
information for the service outputs based on the quality of the workow (Akram et al., 2006). In particular, the WS-BPEL script
service input data and spatial analysis methods. In addition to describes the roles involved in the message exchange, supported
common processing quality factors and output quality factors, (Gui port types, and orchestration information of a process to enable
et al., 2009) integrated dynamic features of services, such as data the composition of workows based on loosely coupled services.
size and network bandwidth into a preliminary QoS assessment Therefore, WS-BPEL is being widely used in geoprocessing orches-
model for geoprocessing services. tration (Fleuren and Muller, 2008; Meng et al., 2009; Schaeffer,
Enabling the commercial use of geoprocessing services in an 2009; Zhao et al., 2011).
on-demand and ad-hoc fashion depends strongly on the efciency The orchestration of geoprocessing services is one of the major
of service security, and manageability. (Schaffer and Gartmann, research areas promising for enabling complex geospatial appli-
2011) have presented OGCs generic security extension that goes cations and knowledge discovery over the Web (Brauner et al.,
beyond classical role-based access control models to support ad- 2009). One of the earliest studies on chaining geographic infor-
hoc license agreements directly in process, without any prior mation Web services was by (Alameh, 2003). She proposed a Web
ofine negotiated agreements being necessary between the ser- service model that allowed users to freely combine Web services
vice provider and service user for on-demand access. to create customized geospatial information applications with
minimal programming, integration, and maintenance efforts. To
4.4. Geoprocessing orchestration enable scientists to harvest online geospatial resources and create
models for designing and executing experiments, (Jager et al.,
By dynamically collaborating distributed individual Web ser- 2005) presented a workow framework for discovering, register-
vices into long-lived, transactional and multi-step service chains, ing, composing, and executing Web services. (Di et al., 2005) and
the service orchestration allows design and execution of a com- (Granell et al., 2005) proposed the abstract process and relevant
plex processing workow across domains and applications (Peltz, elementary workow patterns for the conceptual foundation of
2003). The ISO19119/Service Architecture standard denes a reusing existing domain models and services in service orches-
service chain as a sequence of services where, for each adjacent tration. (Friis-Christensen et al., 2009) introduced the term Dis-
pair of services, occurrence of the rst action is necessary for the tributed Geographic Information Processing (DGIP) and presented
occurrence of the second action (ISO, 2005). Three architectural different architectural patterns for chaining of geoprocessing
patterns for geospatial service chains are identied (Alameh, services. (Dasgupta and Ghosh, 2010) developed a framework
2003; ISO, 2005): which could incorporate business logic for chaining of data and
processing services to generate user specic geospatial informa-
 Transparent chaining tion at any location for mobile device users.
In transparent chaining, the knowledgeable user plays a On the standardization level, the OGC, the ISO TC211 and WfMC
central role in nding all the required geospatial services and have been collaborating for many years, and producing a signicant
data and dening a service chain with different components body of knowledge and experience in geospatial service specica-
and specic interactions. Furthermore, the user is responsible tions, workow architecture, workow metadata and language,
for invoking the services and passing around process results. workow security and licensing, and workow interface and
Since all service details are visible to the user, this pattern is implementation. These standardization efforts have made great
called transparent chaining. progress on the use of Web services to build geospatial processing
 Translucent chaining workows (Keens, 2007; Werling, 2008; Schaeffer, 2009). (Deng
Translucent chaining pattern allows a user to execute a service et al., 2004) implemented a prototype system by which users can
 P. Zhao et al. / Computers & Geosciences 47 (2012) 312 9

build a workow with OGC services to do image processing for Language Transformations (XSLT). To facilitate semantic reasoning,
remote sensing data. (Kiehle et al., 2006) used standardized OGC the query is represented using SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query
Web services and workow management facilities to implement Language (SPARQL), and the semantic rules are represented using
highly complex service chains with geoprocessing capabilities. Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL). More recently, the GeoS-
(Weiser and Zipf, 2007) and (Stollberg and Zipf, 2007) discussed PARQL standard, a geographic query language for RDF data, is
how OGC Web services, in particular Emergency Route Service proposed by OGC to dene the spatial extensions to the W3Cs
(ERS) and OpenLS Route Service, could be used within a service SPARQL.
chain through BPEL scripts for disaster management. (Schaeffer, In the Geoprocessing Web environment, large volumes of
2008) introduced a BPEL deployment prole to expose geospatial geospatial data and diverse geoprocessing functions are often
processing workows as simple OGC WPS-based geoprocesse accessible as services. An intelligent mechanism is required to
models. Thus, geoprocessing workows can be triggered using facilitate discovery and integration of geospatial data and ser-
OGC-compliant messaging. For e-Science applications in a sensor vices. (Lutz, 2007) presented a methodology for ontology-based
web environment, (Zyl and Vahed, 2009), (Yu et al., 2010), and discovery of geoprocessing services using ontologies of geospatial
(Chen et al., 2011) proposed to use OGC Sensor Model Language operations and function subtyping. In the EU-funded Semantic
(SensorML) and WS-BPEL to integrate logical and physical processes Web Services Interoperability for Geospatial Decision Making
into a composite geoprocessing chain for sensor observations. (SWING) project, Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO) is
Besides the current research, still some challenges remain used to facilitate the discovery and invocation of semantically
open. Performance is an important issue in geoprocessing orches- described geoprocessing services (Roman et al., 2006; Zaharia
tration. To transfer large volumes of geospatial data among et al., 2009). A semantic layer including Web Ontology Service
distributed services efciently, suitable workow patterns and and Web Reasoning Service is further proposed for semantic
data encodings have to be found. Use of reference data might be discovery, dynamic orchestration of sensors and Web services,
one solution for centralized workow approaches (Yu et al., 2008; and semantic interoperability (Janowicz et al., 2010). To support
Foerster et al., 2011b). (Friis-Christensen et al., 2009) studied the effective reasoning during the service discovery, (Fitzner et al.,
several patterns of geoprocessing workows, which are promising 2011) proposed to annotate geoprocessing services as conjunctive
to be elaborated for efcient encoding of data in the future. queries in a logic programming language. The linked data
Asynchronous mechanisms, by which clients can resume their approach also shows promise to connect distributed resources
processing without waiting for a lone response, are very useful for including geospatial data and geoprocessing services. Some work
the performance of complicated geoprocessing workows. (Zhao has been conducted on applying linked data principles to OGC
et al., 2011) discussed the different asynchronous patterns and service standards (Schade et al., 2010).
examined different ways to implement asynchronous geoproces- To enable semi-automated or automated geospatial knowl-
sing workows, but in which the notication mechanisms still edge discovery, (Yue et al., 2007) proposed a semantics-enabled
need to be enhanced. Security and licensing of specic geoproces- architecture for automatic geoprocessing service chaining.
sing workows might is another issue, as foreseen by INSPIRE Further, a three-phase intelligent chaining method was addressed
(2008), for the sustainability and the commercial potential of to cover process modeling, model instantiation, and workow
Geoprocessing Web. Challenges regarding the delegation of rights execution (Yue et al., 2009). In order for the chaining results to be
between secured service providers, workow engines and service consumable, semantics-enabled geospatial metadata needs to be
users are arising. One solution to solve this issue in an interoper- generated, validated, and propagated through the service chains.
able way, which uses open standards and generic security exten- The generated metadata not only provides a context in which
sions, has been presented by (Schaffer and Gartmann, 2011) for end-users can interpret data products before intensive execution
opaque workows, but has to be extended to other workow of service chains, but also assures semantic consistency of the
patterns. service chains. The geospatial catalogue service that imports
geospatial metadata with semantics can be used to support
4.5. Geospatial semantics semantics-enhanced discovery of geoprocessing resources (Yue
et al., 2010b).
Semantic Web (Berners-Lee et al., 2001) technologies, which give
machine-processable meanings to the documents, enable the
semantics of geospatial data and geoprocessing services machine- 5. Implementation of the Geoprocessing Web
understandable and thus can be processed by machines (reasoning)
for more effective discovery, reuse, automation, and integration of 5.1. Geoprocessing Web systems
geospatial information and knowledge. The importance of semantics
on accessing and integrating geospatial information has long been The different aspects of Geoprocessing Web have been
recognized (Bishr, 1998; Sheth, 1999; Kuhn, 2005). The semantic addressed in a variety of existing successful Web systems.
interoperability assures that the contents of data and geoprocessing The Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) pro-
services are correctly understood when data/services are connected vides Web portals for searching and exploring the geospatial data,
(Yue et al., 2007). information, imagery, services, and applications across organizations
Since 2005, OGC has issued the Geospatial Semantic Web (GEOSS, 2012). The European Commission Ground European Net-
Interoperability Experiment (GSW IE) aiming to develop a method work for Earth Science Interoperations-Digital Earth Communities
of discovering, querying and collecting geospatial content on the (GENESI-DEC) project uses semantic technologies to facilitate the
basis of formal semantic specications (Kolas et al., 2005; annotation, search, discovery and access of heterogeneous Earth
Kammersell and Dean, 2006; Lutz and Kolas, 2007). In this experi- science data with metadata catalogues (GENESI-DEC, 2012).
ment, ve types of ontologies, including base geospatial ontology, The NASA GES-DISC (Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Informa-
feature data source ontology, geospatial service ontology, geospatial tion Services Center) Interactive Online Visualization ANd aNalysis
lter ontology and domain ontology, are identied. With the help of Infrastructure (Giovanni) provides a series of Web portals for online
these ontologies, a users query can be translated to semantic visualization, access, and analysis of Earth science remote sensing
queries for data source via semantic rules, and then transformed data (Berrick et al., 2009). It has an intuitive and responsive
to OGC WFS queries for real data through Extensible Stylesheet interface running in a Web browser. Web services and workows
10 P. Zhao et al. / Computers & Geosciences 47 (2012) 312

are used in analyzing the data. The provenance on data processing The syntactic interoperability issue has been addressed inten-
is also provided to users. Giovanni has been used in many Earth sively by geospatial communities such as OGC and ISO/TC211.
scientic research efforts and applications (Prados et al., 2010). Standards on different types of geospatial services have been
GeoBrain is a geospatial service, modeling and knowledge available and widely used in geospatial Web applications. Some
building framework (Di, 2004). The GeoBrain Online Analysis existing standards may need to be extended to work in the
System (GeOnAS) takes advantage of open and standardized Geoprocessing Web. For example, the ISO 19115 metadata stan-
Web services and architecture to provide interoperable online dard denes lineage information classes and subclasses. But, it
analysis of geospatial data (Han et al., 2008). It provides an open misses some key information needed for documenting the pro-
data platform by which users are able to discover and access venance or geoprocessing, such as the running environment, the
distributed geospatial information using the NASA EOS Metadata algorithms, and software executables. Therefore, the lineage model
Clearinghouse (ECHO), NOAA Comprehensive Large Array-data in ISO 19115 alone cannot meet the need for capturing the
Stewardship System (CLASS), and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) provenance in the Geoprocessing Web. One potential solution is
Landsat Archive Catalogs. Within the context of SOA, GeOnAS to combine lineage models in ISO 19115 and ISO 19115-2 to
provides an interoperable application platform to enable users to provide a comprehensive provenance information model (Di, 2011).
create customized data analysis systems with a collection of The Semantic Web technologies have been investigated inten-
loosely coupled Web services. Moreover, GeOnAS provides a sively in recent years, and have been proved to be useful in
collaboration platform that allows different users to contribute improving semantic interoperability and facilitate knowledge
geospatial processes and data products for sharing, exchange, and exchange and services. For example, Web Ontology Service and
reuse (Zhao et al., in press). Web Reasoning Service can be used to provide the knowledge
The European Space Agency (ESA) Grid Processing on Demand services (Janowicz et al., 2010). Although there are still some open
(G-POD) is an operational system for Earth science applications. It issues on automatic semantic annotation and consensus based
provides a Web portal to support users to create geoprocessing Web geospatial ontologies and alignment, the use of semantics in
tasks, manage tasks, select data, and monitor jobs using high- limited-domain applications has shown great promise in opera-
performance and sizeable computing resources managed by grid tional systems such as GeoBrain, GENESI-DEC, and GEON.
technologies (ESA, 2012).
The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) funded GEON
project aims to develop a cyberinfrastructure for integration of 6. Conclusions
3 and 4 dimension Earth science data (GEON, 2012). It uses a set
of software services to build Web-based geoinformatic systems From the Web science (Berners-Lee et al., 2006a) perspective,
for different Earth science applications. For example, the Open the Geoprocessing Web is about engineering a geoprocessing
Earth Framework provides a geological and geophysical data infrastructure, utilizing openness to reuse geoprocessing facilities,
integration, analysis and visualization environment. making distributed and interoperable geoprocessing tools, and
enhancing geoscientic collaboration with the ready-to-use geo-
processing tools. This paper discusses the current state-of-the-art
5.2. Technology readiness of the Geoprocessing Web. The key issues and related technolo-
gies include the concept and framework for building cutting-edge
In order to develop, deploy and invoke distributed geoproces- distributed and interoperable geospatial applications, the basic
sing services in an efcient way, performance and interoperability knowledge and recent progress of standards for interoperable geos-
issues need to be more investigated (Kiehle et al., 2007). For patial data and services, the techniques for design, development,
example, some geoprocessing tasks can work more effectively on deployment, and operation of geospatial services, the theories and
users desktop computers or a centralized server than on dis- applications of the geospatial Semantic Web, the models, methods,
tributed services, considering factors on the time of transferring languages, and tools of geospatial service orchestration, and some
massive datasets across networks or multiple interactions operational Web-based geoprocessing systems and related technolo-
between clients and services. There are some design decisions, gical readiness.
including transactional mode, service granularity, communication Our study reveals the Geoprocessing Web is changing the way
manners, and transmission formats, for improving the service in which geospatial applications and systems are designed,
performance (Tu et al., 2004; Scholten et al., 2006; Michaelis and developed and deployed. While there are still some important
Ames, 2009). The transactional mode includes synchronous and challenges in this eld, we believe the Geoprocessing Web
asynchronous modes. Solutions on asynchronous geospatial pro- provides a promising framework to facilitate distributed geospa-
cessing workows with Web services have been available (Zhao tial computation and large networks of collaboration.
et al., 2012). The granularity of individual services is an important
factor that affects the exibility, applicability, and reusability of
service modules in different geospatial models. If a modules Acknowledgements
functionality is too small, many modules are needed to construct
a complex geospatial model, hence reducing the system perfor- This work was funded jointly by National Basic Research Program
mance. If too many functions are aggregated into a service of China (2011CB707105) and Project 41023001 supported by NSFC.
module, the module is not easily plugged into other geospatial
models. Thus, service exibility, applicability, and reusability will
decrease. The fundamental geoprocessing functions in GIS soft- References
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