Geospatial Workflow in a Sensor Web Environment: Transactions, Events, and Asynchrony

Geospatial processing has been extended to the Web environment. In conjunction with observations fed from live sensors, workflows can be used to connect the sensors observations to the product at the user's end. In the work described in this paper, the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) was used as a script language to describe workflows. OGC Sensor Web Enablement specifications have been used to enable the retrieval of sensor observations, implementation of geospatial processing services, and integration of Web processing services. The framework developed was used to study a case of severe weather detection and tracking. The OGC Web Coverage Service (WCS) and Web Feature Service (WFS), both with transaction support, are used to manage satellite observations and geographic features. The OGC Web Processing Service (WPS) is used to manage geospatial processing services. The resulting workflow demonstrated the reusability of geospatial Web services, the capability for transactions and asynchrony, and the efficiency of parallelism and distributed computing.