Standardized Geoprocessing - Taking Spatial Data Infrastructures one Step Further

Spatial data infrastructures (SDI) have been widely accepted to share geospatial data among organizations. Today SDI’s main focus lies on distributed data storage in the form of spatial web services, the retrieval through catalogues, and the visualization in form of web map services. The hypothesis presented in this paper takes SDI’s one step further by providing a method to process geodata, in an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) compliant way, into information. It addresses the problem of service chaining by providing a system architecture to process data into information using Business Processes. The proposed methods utilize spatial standards provided by OGC, International Standardisation Organisation (ISO) and ‘mainstream IT’ standards provided by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to achieve highly complex service chains with geoprocessing capabilities. In companion with semantic description of service’s metadata, a self-organizing net can be established. Two case studies present the potential of standardized geoprocessing services. The result is a generic service for providing common geoinformation capabilities (e.g. spatial algorithms, Map Algebra etc.) for using in next level SDI.