Summary:
This Master thesis assesses three OpenGIS standards published by the Open
Geospatial Consortium (OGC), namely WFS, WPS and SOS, standards which specify
three types of network services operating on geospatial data. The services are
accessible over the network via an interface based on the POST and GET
operations of the HTTP protocol. These interfaces, albeit easy to implement and
access, do not fit well in a contemporary applications environment based on a
service-oriented architecture. Having such an environment in mind, arises the
task of implementing a web service (in the SOAP/WSDL sense) interface for each
of the aforementioned services. The chosen approach is that of facade web
service implementations on top of existing implementations of the three
services. A subsequent task undertaken is demonstrating the ability of
incorporating the newly implemented web services into service oriented WS-BPEL
processes. Deploying a facade close to an existing deployed implementation of
its corresponding OGC service, thus offering the ability to deliver the service
to a new host of service oriented solutions, seems to be an attractive choice
to any service provider, taking into account its relatively small footprint as
well as its reasonable processing overhead.
Keywords:
Geospatial service, Geospatial data, Web service, Business process, OpenGIS
