Constraints-driven automatic geospatial service composition: Workflows for the analysis of sea-level rise impacts

Abstract

Building applications based on the reuse of existing components or services has noticeably increased in the geospatial application domain, but researchers still face a variety of technical challenges designing workflows for their specific objectives and preferences. Hence, means for automatic service composition that provide semantics-based assistance in the workflow design process have become a frequent demand especially of end users who are not IT experts. This paper presents a method for automatic composition of workflows for analyzing the impacts of sea-level rise based on semantic domain modeling. The domain modeling comprises the design of adequate services, the definition of ontologies to provide domain-specific vocabulary for referring to types and services, and the input/output annotation of the services using the terms defined in the ontologies. We use the PROPHETS plugin of the jABC workflow framework to show how users can benefit from such a domain model when they apply its constraints-driven synthesis methods to obtain the workflows that match their intentions.