Constraints-Driven Automatic Geospatial Service Composition: Workflows for the Analysis of Sea-Level Rise Impacts

Abstract

Abstract. Building applications based on the reuse of existing components or services has noticeably increased in the geospatial application domain, but researchers still face a variety of technical challenges designing workflows for their specific objectives and preferences. Hence, means for automatic service composition that provide semantics-based assistance in the workflow design process have become a frequent demand especially of end users who are not IT experts. This paper presents a method for automatic composition of workflows for analyzing the impacts of sea-level rise based on semantic domain modeling. The domain modeling comprises the design of adequate services, the definition of ontologies to provide domain-specific vocabulary for referring to types and services, and the input/output annotation of the services using the terms defined in the ontologies. We use the PROPHETS plugin of the jABC workflow framework to show how users can benefit from such a domain model when they apply its constraintsdriven synthesis methods to obtain the workflows that match their intentions.

Full Meta Object profiling for flexible geoprocessing workflows

“…Furthermore, utilizing artificial intelligence path‐planning strategies alongside ontology descriptions of workflow components can also help with the semiautomatic creation of geospatial workflows, and these descriptions may be encoded in ISO19115 documents in a CSW (Yue et al, ). Al‐Areqi, Lamprecht, and Margaria () also describe annotating web services with ontologies to enable automatic composition of workflows based on an initial sketch provided by the user.…”

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.…”

“…Al-Areqi et al [6] developed an approach to automatic geospatial service composition based on domain modelling. The domain model includes domain specific services, their descriptions, and a taxonomy of services.…”

“…Data and geoprocessing web services are promoted as approaches to automating the development of spatial analysis workflows in order to derive information from data [4][5][6]. The vision of full automation is yet out of reach because the translation of user objectives into a series of spatial analysis operations requires knowledge about spatial data and geoprocessing operations that is not accessible to machines to date [7,8].…”

“…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].…”