Distributed Geospatial Analysis through Web Processing Service: A Case Study of Earthquake Disaster Assessment

Abstract

Web Processing Service (WPS) is a new standard approved by Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), which is aimed to define a standardized interface facilitating the publishing of geospatial processes, and the discovery of and binding to those processes by clients. WPS also acts as a middleware service that obtains geospatial data from an external resource in order to run a process on a local implementation. Consequently, it can be used to wrap other existing OGC geospatial standards designed to provide geospatial services, such as Web Map Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS), and Web Coverage Service (WCS) so as to achieve distributed geospatial analyses. This paper demonstrates three approaches of using WPS to chain geospatial services. The methods are illustrated through a prototype online system for conducting Earthquake Disaster Assessment.