Service-oriented applications for environmental models: Reusable geospatial services

Abstract

Environmental modelling often requires a long iterative process of sourcing, reformatting, analyzing, and introducing various types of data into the model. Much of the data to be analyzed are geospatial data—digital terrain models (DTM), river basin boundaries, snow cover from satellite imagery, etc.—and so the modelling workflow typically involves the use of multiple desktop GIS and remote sensing software packages, with limited compatibility among them. Recent advances in service-oriented architectures (SOA) are allowing users to migrate from dedicated desktop solutions to on-line, loosely coupled, and standards-based services which accept source data, process them, and pass results as basic parameters to other intermediate services and/or then to the main model, which also may be made available on-line. This contribution presents a service-oriented application that addresses the issues of data accessibility and service interoperability for environmental models. Key model capabilities are implemented as geospatial services, which are combined to form complex services, and may be reused in other similar contexts. This work was carried out under the auspices of the AWARE project funded by the European programme Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES). We show results of the service-oriented application applied to alpine runoff models, including the use of geospatial services facilitating discovery, access, processing and visualization of geospatial data in a distributed manner.