An Extension Mechanism to Verify, Constrain and Enhance Geoprocessing Workflows Invocation

Abstract

Geospatial web service composition is a promising means for processing and analyzing geospatial data in distributed computing environments. However, convenient and effective approaches for assisting the invocation of geoprocessing workflows are still missing. Invocation errors frustrate users and eventually impact the popularity and application of geoprocessing workflows due to their complexity, inadequate description, constraints, and prompts for input/output parameters, workflow models, and their components. This article proposes an extension method for easy invocation of geoprocessing workflows to solve these problems. The proposed method facilitates the generation of Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) and invocation messages, for human-computer interaction and client-workflow interaction respectively, by supplementing verification and constraints for workflow descriptions. Furthermore, by providing descriptive information, constraint mechanisms, and visualization functions, this approach enhances human-computer interactivity during invocation. An exemplary user case demonstrates the feasibility of the method.

The Concept and Technologies of Quality of Geographic Information Service: Improving User Experience of GIServices in a Distributed Computing Environment

“…Usability can be a serious impediment to user participation, especially in collecting public views for public-involved applications, like location selection for public infrastructure. Developers utilize usability testing to adjust and improve the design of the user interface and HCI workflow of a GIService [85]. GIServices often deal with large-volume geographic datasets and are time-consuming, so asynchronous invocation and status tracking mechanisms have been proposed to improve usability and the visibility of the processing status in the execution stage of a GIService chain [86].…”

Geospatial Information Processing Technologies

“…In addition, spatial data infrastructures (SDIs) and geoportals such as GEOSS clearinghouse, Data.gov, and INSPIRE do not provide semantic-aware discovery functions. The challenges include determining how to provide a semantic-enabled metadata Registry Information Model (RIM) for GIService semantic description, retrieval and validation (Qi et al 2016;Zhang et al 2017). W3C semantic standards such as the resource description framework (RDF) and OWL-S provide promising solutions for describing domain knowledge, enabling intelligent and efficient service discovery.…”

Coupling Knowledge with GIS Operations: The Benefits of Extended Operation Descriptions

“…The improvement of the workflow development process has been researched from various perspectives; including the translation of spatial questions into operations [28], semantic descriptions of spatial data in order to define which operations can be sensibly applied to the data [7,11], ontologies of domain knowledge that support the automated translation of a user task into operations [6], extended descriptions of geoprocessing operations [12,13,29], and verification of workflows before execution [14,30]. These approaches are discussed in the following section; extended operation descriptions are discussed in more detail in Section 2.2.…”

“…User support in this context can address the translation of spatial questions into workflows, the discovery of suitable data and operations, and the validation of chains of operations. The proposed approaches put different components of the workflow development process at their centre; core concepts of spatial information [9,10], data [7,11], operations [12,13], domain knowledge [6], and workflow verification [14].…”