Abstract
The identification of appropriate mechanisms for process sharing and reuse by means of composition is considered a key enabler for the effective uptake of a global Earth Observation infrastructure, currently pursued by the international geospatial research community. Modelers in need of running complex workflows may benefit from outsourcing process composition to a dedicated external service, according to the brokering approach. This work introduces our architecture of a process broker, as a distributed information system for creating, validating, editing, storing, publishing and executing geospatial-modeling workflows. The broker provides a service framework for adaptation, reuse and complementation of existing processing resources (including models and geospatial services in general) in the form of interoperable, executable workflows. The described solution has been experimentally applied in several use scenarios in the context of EU-funded projects and the Global Earth Observation System of Systems.
Highlights
The initial stove-pipe software tools have evolved to community-wide modeling frameworks, to Component-Based Architecture solutions, and, more recently, empowered by the Web, started to embrace Service-Oriented Architecture technologies, which have emerged as a mechanism for assembling individual services to create customized applications, in the geospatial sector [2]
The level of abstraction of the current solutions for service composition seems too low for implementing the Model Web vision, which results in limited usability and difficult uptake
We introduce the architecture of a Process Broker, as a distributed information system for creating, validating, editing, storing, publishing, and executing geospatial-modeling workflows on the Web
Summary
The identification of appropriate mechanisms for process sharing and reuse, namely by means of composition (of which pipelining, or chaining, may be considered a special case), is considered a key enabler for the effective uptake of a global Earth Observation infrastructure, currently pursued by the international research community in the Earth and Space Sciences, in initiatives like the Global Earth. GEOSS is tasked with the development of the so-called “Model Web”: a dynamic modeling infrastructure to serve researchers, managers, policy makers and the general public This will be composed of loosely coupled models that interact via Web services, and are independently developed, managed, and operated [3]. The level of abstraction of the current solutions for service composition seems too low for implementing the Model Web vision, which results in limited usability and difficult uptake. To address this problem, it has been suggested that users in need of running complex workflows, such as those originating from environmental models, may benefit from outsourcing the composition activities into a dedicated external service, according to the Composition-as-a-Service (CaaS) approach [5].
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