EXPOSING AND PROVIDING ACCESS TO INDIAN BIORESOURCE INFORMATION NETWORK (IBIN) SPECIES OCCURRENCE DATASET AS WEB SERVICE USING OGC WPS STANDARD

Abstract

Abstract. Species occurrence data are collected by many researchers worldwide as record of species present at a specific time at some defined place as part of biological field investigation serving as primary or secondary dataset. These datasets reside in separate silos across numerous distributed systems having different formats limiting its usage to full potential. IBIN portal provides a single window for accessing myriad spatial/non-spatial data on bioresources of the country. To promote reuse of occurrence dataset among organizations in an interoperable format including support for integration across various platforms & programming languages, it is been exposed as web service using OGC Web Processing Service (WPS) standard. WPS provides standardized interface for performing online geo-processing by exposing spatial processes, algorithms and calculations thereby enabling machine to machine communication and wider usage in various scenarios (e.g. service chaining etc.). Open source ZOO-project is used for developing the ‘Species Search’ WPS service. WPS takes inputs as either the species name or bounding box or shapefile defining the area of interest and returns queryable OGC complaint Web Map Service (WMS) as output with specie(s) occurrences represented in grid (5km x 5km) format, with each grid possessing attributes like specie(s) name, family, state, medicinal detail etc. WPS process can be invoked asynchronously, enabling proper feedback regarding status of the job submitted. JavaScript based web client for consuming this service has also been developed along with custom QGIS plugin to allow potential users to access the same in GIS software for wider reusability.