A scientific workflow approach to distributed geospatial data processing using web services

This paper presents a complete framework for registering, discovering, composing and executing Web Services to support online science and shows how these services can be discovered and composed through generic visual interfaces and scientific workflow tools.

Abstract

Geospatial analyses of distributed data from surveys and sensors are often stored and managed in diverse regional, national and global repositories. The nature of scientific processes requires composition of these resources in a meaningful order to solve a specific geoscience problem. These tasks can be viewed as scientific workflows. Web based interfaces allow access to remote data and tools, and enable running computational experiments using different online resources. However, it requires manual processing to combine multiple resources in pipelines and scientists still need IT experts to automate their large-scale scientific workflows. The challenging problem is how to enable the scientists to harvest online data and models for designing and executing experiments in a seamless manner. A solution becomes feasible by the introduction of Web Services in a variety of scientific domains. These services can be discovered and composed through generic visual interfaces and scientific workflow tools. For this purpose, we present a complete framework for registering, discovering, composing and executing Web Services to support online science.