18.3.1 Geospatial Web Service Interoperability Standards
Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and International Standard Organization
ISO/TC211 have developed numerous geospatial Web service interoperability specifications and standards in compliance with related international standards. OGC
defines the specific protocols and interfaces to enable the disparate geospatial
datasets and services exchanging over the Web that the clients can integrate the
multiple-source products. Therefore, their standards and specifications are widely
used in guiding the implementation of geospatial Web service components for the
discovery, access, processing, and management of agricultural data.
The latest Web technologies and OGC standards make it feasible to construct
Web geospatial applications. The following are some popular geospatial data and
processing standards:
• Web Map Service (WMS), which allows the client to uniformly access and render
the map images through the Web (de La Beaujardiere 2006). WMS portrays raster
or vector data in the styles defined in the SLD language (Lupp 2007).
• Web Coverage Service (WCS), which allows the client to seamlessly query and
access the geographical coverage data from distributed servers (Whiteside and
Evans 2008).
• Web Feature Service (WFS), which provides data manipulation (e.g., creation,
updating, and exchange) at the vector feature level for servers and clients
(Vretanos 2010).
• Sensor Observation Service (SOS), which allows the client to query the real-time
sensor data through the Web (Na and Priest 2007; Bröring et al. 2012).
• Catalogue Service for Web (CSW), which enables the client to discover, browse,
and query the metadata of geospatial data and services through the Web (Lesage
2007; Nebert et al. 2007; Martell and Parr-Pearson 2008).
• Web Processing Service (WPS) specification, which provides interface rules for
standardizing inputs and outputs for invoking geospatial processing services.
WPS defines how clients can discover and bind to a process, as well as execute
and handle the output of the process (Schut and Whiteside 2007).
In addition to the OGC standards, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) also
defines a set of standards for Web services, such as Web Services Description
Language (WSDL) (Christensen et al. 2001) and Simple Object Access Protocol
(SOAP) (Mein et al. 2002). The Organization for the Advancement of Structured
Information Standards (OASIS) defines the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) (Jordan et al. 2007) and Registry Information Model
(ebRIM) (Fuger et al. 2005). These standards have all been widely used in the
business world.
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Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and International Standard Organization
ISO/TC211 have developed numerous geospatial Web service interoperability specifications and standards in compliance with related international standards. OGC
defines the specific protocols and interfaces to enable the disparate geospatial
datasets and services exchanging over the Web that the clients can integrate the
multiple-source products. Therefore, their standards and specifications are widely
used in guiding the implementation of geospatial Web service components for the
discovery, access, processing, and management of agricultural data.
The latest Web technologies and OGC standards make it feasible to construct
Web geospatial applications. The following are some popular geospatial data and
processing standards:
• Web Map Service (WMS), which allows the client to uniformly access and render
the map images through the Web (de La Beaujardiere 2006). WMS portrays raster
or vector data in the styles defined in the SLD language (Lupp 2007).
• Web Coverage Service (WCS), which allows the client to seamlessly query and
access the geographical coverage data from distributed servers (Whiteside and
Evans 2008).
• Web Feature Service (WFS), which provides data manipulation (e.g., creation,
updating, and exchange) at the vector feature level for servers and clients
(Vretanos 2010).
• Sensor Observation Service (SOS), which allows the client to query the real-time
sensor data through the Web (Na and Priest 2007; Bröring et al. 2012).
• Catalogue Service for Web (CSW), which enables the client to discover, browse,
and query the metadata of geospatial data and services through the Web (Lesage
2007; Nebert et al. 2007; Martell and Parr-Pearson 2008).
• Web Processing Service (WPS) specification, which provides interface rules for
standardizing inputs and outputs for invoking geospatial processing services.
WPS defines how clients can discover and bind to a process, as well as execute
and handle the output of the process (Schut and Whiteside 2007).
In addition to the OGC standards, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) also
defines a set of standards for Web services, such as Web Services Description
Language (WSDL) (Christensen et al. 2001) and Simple Object Access Protocol
(SOAP) (Mein et al. 2002). The Organization for the Advancement of Structured
Information Standards (OASIS) defines the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL) (Jordan et al. 2007) and Registry Information Model
(ebRIM) (Fuger et al. 2005). These standards have all been widely used in the
business world.
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393