The RichWPS environment for orchestration

Abstract

Web service (WS) orchestration can be considered as a fundamental concept in service-oriented architectures (SOA), as well as in spatial data infrastructures (SDI). In recent years in SOA, advanced solutions were developed, such as realizing orchestrated web services on the basis of already existing more fine-granular web services by using standardized notations and existing orchestration engines. Even if the concepts can be mapped to the field of SDI, on a conceptual level the implementations target different goals. As a specialized form of a common web service, an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) web service (OWS) is optimized for a specific purpose. On the technological level, web services depend on standards like the Web Service Description Language (WSDL) or the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). However OWS are different. Consequently, a new concept for OWS orchestration is needed that works on the interface provided by OWS. Such a concept is presented in this work. The major component is an orchestration engine integrated in a Web Processing Service (WPS) server that uses a domain specific language (DSL) for workflow description. The developed concept is the base for the realization of new functionality, such as workflow testing, and workflow optimization.