Abstract
When trying to compose services that are developed according to different standards, interoperability issues arise that are often faced by developing ad-hoc solutions. A typical example is represented by the composition of W3C and OGC services, which were developed more or less concurrently by independent organizations. In such a context, developing a wrapper that abstracts as much as possible the inner details and logic of a wrapped service well embraces the low-coupled nature of the general Service Oriented Computing paradigm. This paper focuses on the proper management of geospatial metadata into a W3C-based environment and is based on the development of a wrapper that exposes OGC functionality in a W3C-compliant way, thus overcoming the technical differences between the two types of services. To efficiently accomplish this task, a flexible, wrapper-based, and standard-compliant mechanism for metadata retrieval is proposed that avoids the use of third-party entities. The proposal exploits the scalable and adaptable nature of the WS-Metadata (Web Services Metadata) specification.
Highlights
Nowadays, we are witnessing an explosive growth of software applications, which, by aggregating and harnessing the rich information available from highly diverse data sources, are transforming the way we use information in our daily activities
Use of the SOAP protocol for the actual exchange of geographic information; use of the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) standard to describe the public interface of a generic Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) service; and, proper management of the fundamental geospatial metadata in a W3C standards oriented infrastructure
It is worth noting that OGC envisages that an XML encoded GetCapabilities request may be embedded in a SOAP message
Summary
We are witnessing an explosive growth of software applications, which, by aggregating and harnessing the rich information available from highly diverse data sources, are transforming the way we use information in our daily activities. In order to achieve the practical fulfilment of those service-based solutions, every entity that is involved in the computation must adhere to a set of globally accepted standards that regulate the fundamental aspects concerning the structure of a service In this context, the World Wide Web. Consortium (W3C) has established a series of proposals whose specification and implementation rely on the use of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) in order to guarantee their independence from a specific platform [3]. We investigate a solution to the geospatial data exchange among systems that are built according to different standards and software technologies, taking into account the role that metadata play for the actual exploitation of both geospatial information in general and OGC services.
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