useful references - GI Days 2008

I came across the GI Days 2008 conference website the other day. There were a good number of papers relating to WPS. In particular:

Towards a Quality Aware Web Processing Service (Donubauer et al) describes a project to develop a web service that gives an indication of the quality of the results based on the quality of the input data. In their forestry use case the process is a polygon overlay. With the source data the accuracy is provided at a line segment (of each polygon) level. The WPS returns the area and standard deviation of the overlay. The accuracy data is passed to the process embedded in metaDataProperty tags in the source GML. Including something similar in my implementation of WPS is probably beyond the scope of my project but it is something I need to at least make reference to.

Web-based geostatistics using WPS (Jorge de Jesus et al) describes the development of a WPS for spatial interpolation, Kriging, in particular. The output from the process is a reference to a geoTIFF document that can be downloaded using a browser. This project has similarities with my own in that it uses point source data. They note that the “verbosity” of XML is a problem when sending thousands of points observations. Another issue is that GML allows for multiple ways of describing the same data which presents a problem to the programmer. They too raise the issue of quality and make reference to the work done with UncertML (original paper).

Providing GRASS with a Web Processing Service Interface (Bruaner) describes how WPS can be integrated with the GRASS desktop GIS. In a discussion on state he notes that each time you read a dataset in a stateless web-based system you process it and then throw it away. He contrasts this with the classic stateful desktop GIS where you load up your data sources and work on them for as long as necessary.