Web Services and Grid Technology in Digital Forestry

Abstract

As an organic composition of Digital Earth, Digital Forestry is a dynamic concept and its technologies is developed and perfected accompanied with the development of information technology and management techniques. The information and data of the Digital Forestry is wide, rich content, huge and dispersed. It is an urgent problem how to integrate these data and make it useful for forestry decision-making and forestry management. Grid and Web services provide the key to solving these problems. The design objects and function of Web services in Digital Forestry platform which aimed at the character of forestry information construction was been expatiated in this paper. The structure of the Digital Forestry platform was put forward with service-oriented architecture and Grid technology. Virtualization of resources in Grid technology is reflected by the form of Web services and the state is an important concept in Grid computing. HTTP agreement is stateless and we often agree that Web services are stateless entities, but the state is very important for us, the problem how to realize the orderly Web services need to be solved in time. WFRS (Web Services Resource Framework) give us a way to solve this problem. WSRF is a series of norms to describe the "state" of the resources and the relationship between Web services. WS-Resource is the core of WSRF. In this paper we studied the relation between Web services, state and WFRS. It is the WFRS. net technology which is used in this paper to design the Digital Forestry Web services platform. The development of Forestry service standards, the methods of services registered, the service call mechanism and the way of service publication were discussed in the WSRF-based Web Service. The Web service registering, publishing, inquiring and using were implemented on this platform. A new method of types of forestry information sharing and multi-management level and multi-operation field cooperative working was provided by our WSRF-based and Grid-supported platform in this paper.