Proceedings of the 6 AGILE Dates – Lieu INTEGRATING SIMULATION MODELS INTO SDI’S

Spatial data infrastructures (SDI) are currently one of the hot topics within the geographic information domain. Mature interoperability standards and specifications have evolved in the last years, mainly driven by the work of the OpenGIS Consortium (OGC)[1]. As there are a couple of specifications available describing the interchange and processing of static geographic data and forming the basis for building up a SDI, the demand of accessing spatio-temporal data via the web is growing but is still unsatisfied. First actions have been taken by standardizing interfaces for the “Sensor Web Enablement” (SWE), that allows near realtime access to georeferenced measurement data collected by sensors. Beeing aware of the fact that a simulator does not differ from a sensor regarding the provision of spatio-temporal data (it only differs in the way how it estimates the requested value and its virtually temporal independence), there is an urge to include simulators into SDI’s which would fulfil the need of countless application domains: It would provide sophisticated simulation functionality via an easy to use web-based infrastructure. Rather than inventing the wheel again, building bridges between OGC specifications and standards within the modelling and simulation community will allow both communities the geoinformation one as well as the simulation one – to benefit from what has been achieved. This paper describes the current results of a project aiming at the interoperability of the leading standardized simulation framework, the High Level Architecture (HLA) and the OGC specifications. The functionality of simulations will be made available to the web service community.