Enabling Quality of Geospatial Web Services

Abstract

Following concerted efforts in service chaining and increased maturity of requisite technologies, the potential of geospatial web services in mission-critical applications and business processes is increasingly becoming apparent. Use of geospatial web services in mission-critical applications and business processes nonetheless raises important quality concerns for which guarantees should be provided. As a contribution to the subject of quality of geospatial web services, this chapter identifies and elaborates quality concerns pertinent to geospatial web services and their use in mission critical applications and business processes. The chapter defines a quality model for geospatial web services comprising data quality and quality of service. Quality propagation is outlined and the influence of quality of input data and that of component geospatial web services in a service chain on the quality deliverable end-to-end illustrated. Further, an ontology framework for quality of geospatial web services is presented. The framework comprises an upper ontology, two domain ontologies and potentially many application ontologies. Collectively, the ontologies provide a consistent set of concepts that can be used to unambiguously define and reason about quality of geospatial web services. The chapter also proposes a domain middleware to facilitate efficient and cost-effective quality-aware chaining of geospatial web services. The service design and high-level architecture for the middleware are presented.