Developing a Web Service-Compatible Map Server for Geophysical Applications

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) defines a number of standards (both for data models and for online services) that have been widely adopted in the Geographical Information System (GIS) community. In this paper we will describe our group's efforts to implement GIS services according to OGC standard specifications in accordance with the Web Services approach. This paper focuses on the Web Map Service (WMS), which we are coupling to problems in computational geophysics. Through the use of Web Services, we are able to integrate GIS services with other families of services, including information, data management, and remote application execution and management. We also describe WMS client building efforts that are suitable for integration with computational Web portals. To be able to interact with non-Web Service versions of WMS, we also have built bridging service for our extended WMS. Since Web Service oriented WMS has a different request/response paradigm from non-Web Service versions, we have extended cascading WMS by adding request handler functionality. This kind of WMS behaves like both a cascading WMS and a proxy to handle different types of requests to overcome interoperability problems between different WMS systems.