Johannes Brauner

Integrating OGC Web Processing Services into Geospatial Mass-Market Applications

Enabling the integration of information provided by OGC Web Processing Services into geospatial mass-market applications is promising, as it increases the availability of information for most ordinary users. This information will be most likely based on the latest available data (e.g. collected by sensors) and can thereby support the user in time-constrained decisions. This paper presents an approach to actually configure and integrate such processes into geospatial mass-market applications. The applicability of the approach is demonstrated by a risk management scenario. The software presented has been developed within the Geoprocessing Community of the 52°North initiative and is available through an Open Source license.

Scientific geodata infrastructures: challenges, approaches and directions

Based on various experiences in developing Geodata Infrastructures (GDIs) for scientific applications, this article proposes the concept of a Scientific GDI that can be used by scientists in environmental and earth sciences to share and disseminate their research results and related analysis methods. Scientific GDI is understood as an approach to tackle the science case in Digital Earth and to further enhance e-science for environmental research. Creating Scientific GDI to support the research community in efficiently exchanging data and methods related to the various scientific disciplines forming the basis of environmental studies poses numerous challenges on todays GDI developments. The paper summarizes requirements and recommendations on the publication of scientific geospatial data and on functionalities to be provided in Scientific GDI. Best practices and open issues for governance and policies of a Scientific GDI are discussed and are concluded by deriving a research agenda for the next decade.

A Service-Oriented Framework for Real-Time and Distributed Geoprocessing

With increasing availability of network bandwidth, server side processing capacity and advancements regarding the standardization of Web Service technologies, it becomes feasible to process geodata over the Web. As a result, web-based geoinformation is generated, which supports in particular spatial decision making. However, existing Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) mainly address data retrieval and portrayal, but to provide web-based geoinformation through SDIs web-based geoprocessing is required. This was the starting point to develop a framework which integrates existing desktop Geographical Information System functionality in SDIs. Moreover, an approach will be introduced to improve complex and large-scale geoprocesses in two dimensions: On the vertical scale, by significantly increasing the performance of single processes by means of Grid Computing technology and by improving other Quality of Service aspects. On the horizontal scale, by chaining this highly efficient processing services in order to automate these business processes. The relevance of this work will be demonstrated in a real-world scenario focusing on air quality assessment based on real-time data with the help of open source components.

Towards a knowledge base to support geoprocessing workflow development

ABSTRACT The spatial analysis functionalities of geographic information systems (GIS) are increasingly used across the web. Interface specifications of geoprocessing web services define the syntactic properties of the services (number and type of parameters) and provide textual descriptions of the operations. The discovery and reuse of web services based on these syntactic properties is restricted and has led to the quest for extended operation descriptions. A number of extended operation descriptions have been proposed and are reviewed in this article. The reviewed descriptions focus on particular steps of the workflow development process. In this article we analyse all phases of the development process of a spatial analysis workflow regarding the requirements of operation descriptions. These requirements are translated into a knowledge base that contains information about spatial analysis operations for the operations’ discovery, selection and composition. The knowledge base also foresees the automated discovery of operations in well-defined application contexts such as the transformation of data types or coordinate reference systems. The knowledge base combines the geooperator approach with elements of ontology-based approaches. The geooperator browser is the implementation of the discovery and selection of geoprocessing operations based on the knowledge base. A draft formalization of the knowledge base demonstrates its use and the support it provides during the composition of operations.

Design and prototype of an interoperable online air quality information system

This paper focuses on the design and development of a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI)-compliant online system for air quality information retrieval, including support for real-time monitoring. This system assesses exposure to ambient air to mitigate potential health risks, which is crucial for susceptible individuals, health practitioners and decision makers. Particular attention is paid to the development of an interoperable, applicable and transferrable approach to the application of robust and flexible air quality modeling as required for early warning systems on the Web. Moreover, the design provides different access levels to system components for both non-expert and scientific users and supports extension with external standard compliant services. The developed Web-client Time2Maps enables the user to view, analyze and download requested air quality information and serves as a portal to the designed online system.