Design of a Software Framework Based on Geospatial Standards to Facilitate Environmental Modeling Workflows

Environmental modelling workflows are often tedious due to heterogeneity of data sources, types and formats. This paper discusses how a software framework based on Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards may facilitate the workflow steps and improve their flexibility by supporting data access, processing, and decision-making. The software framework is designed based on OGC standards, which can be realized in any modern programming language, to encapsulate processing algorithms (so called fusors) that fuse the environmental input data and run a model based computation. Such a software framework can improve the integration of new data sources into environmental applications as well as the data exchange between scientists who can then focus on the real application problem at hand. The open source model MODFLOW, which is worldwide one of the standard codes for groundwater flow simulation, is taken here as an example data fusor. A further objective of this software framework is to offer the complete modelling workflow as a web service.