GEOSS service factory: Assisted publication of geospatial content

Abstract

Information systems undergo a change from isolated solutions to open infrastructures based on Web Services. Geospatial applications have followed this trend for more than ten years to deal with data representing the status of our environment. International organizations and initiatives promote standards for data encodings and service interfaces that allow establishing Geospatial Information Infrastructures (GIIs). These GIIs provide services to address most of the steps in the geospatial user workflow, such as discovery, access, visualization and processing. However, they do not provide services to assist users in the publication of content. The lack of this functionality challenges the implementation and maintenance of GIIs since publication of content remains a complex task turning GIIs into top-down infrastructures without user participation. In this paper, we suggest extending classical GII architectures with a service that assists in content publication. The Abstract Factory design pattern is used to model this service as a scalable component and the OGC WPS has been chosen as the service interface to increase interoperability. We introduce a prototype as a proof of concept to be evaluated in a forest fire information system. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011.