Distributed Geospatial Analysis through Web Processing Service: A Case Study of Earthquake Disaster Assessment Xiaoliang Meng 1 1 Research Center of Spatial Information and Digital Engineering, Wuhan University Wuhan, Hubei 430079, China Email: mengxiaoliang2000@126.com Yichun Xie 2 and Fuling Bian 1 2 Institute for Geospatial Research and Education, Eastern Michigan University Ypsilanti, MI 48197, USA Email: yxie@emich.edu, flbian@yahoo.com Abstract—Web Processing Service (WPS) is a new standard approved by Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), which is aimed to define a standardized interface facilitating the publishing of geospatial processes, and the discovery of and binding to those processes by clients. WPS also acts as a middleware service that obtains geospatial data from an external resource in order to run a process on a local implementation. Consequently, it can be used to wrap other existing OGC geospatial standards designed to provide geospatial services, such as Web Map Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS), and Web Coverage Service (WCS) so as to achieve distributed geospatial analyses. This paper demonstrates three approaches of using WPS to chain geospatial services. The methods are illustrated through a prototype online system for conducting Earthquake Disaster Assessment. Index Terms—Distributed geospatial analysis, Geospatial service, Web Processing Service, Services chain, Earthquake Disaster Assessment System I. INTRODUCTION Web-based GIS (also known as distributed GIS or Internet-based GIS) signifies a new type of GIS platform, which is easily accessible, easy-to-use, and easy-to-share. However, the development of Web- based GIS is facing many challenges, both classic and new. Interoperability is a classic challenge because each GIS system usually has its own proprietary data format. New challenges come from several fronts. The first one is how to incorporate GIS analytical functions with input data of spatial features and descriptive characteristics across Internet [1]. The second one is how to take advantage of large volumes of distributed data and alleviate bottlenecks of massive user interactions and Internet communication [2]. The third one concerns the adoption of development tool kits and development standards that are either open source or proprietary [3, 4]. These challenges have led to rapid growth of various solutions to Web-based GIS software and systems. For instance, enterprise information systems are evolving toward Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), while geospatial technologies are moving along the same direction [5]. The open and interoperable SOA is taking place of the traditional monolithic GIS. Geospatial analysis (or process) using the technology of distributed geospatial database system becomes more and more important because of its capacity of supporting data interoperability in transmission [6]. Distributed geospatial analysis (DGA) has long been a technical challenge for several disciplines involved with GIS development. DGA can be defined as an execution of geographic data processing and analysis with geospatial data physically located in a varied number of spatial databases, not necessarily homogeneous, interconnected by a computer network [7]. Many efforts have been reported in the literature on how to address the practical issues of distributed geospatial analysis [4, 7, 8, 9]. Geospatial data are present in different formats and with numerous specifications, such as scale, projection, spatial reference, representation type, thematic, DBMS type, date, etc. The heterogeneity and complexity of the geospatial data complicates geo- JOURNAL OF SOFTWARE, VOL. 5, NO. 6, JUNE 2010 671 © 2010 ACADEMY PUBLISHER