Geospatial Web Services for Environmental Planning

Abstract

Category of paper: Research paper Purpose of the research: Environmental planning requires integration of disparate geographic database and services in a distributed environment involving multiple stakeholders. As more and more mapping resources are becoming available, the Web is becoming a confluence of collaborative interactions, negotiations and planning platforms. Web services could offer a framework for service integration and composition for collaborative environmental modeling. The objective of this paper is to provide a theoretical framework for understanding how features of Web services can be related to implementation standards and protocols of distributed environmental planning involving geographic information systems. Methodology: Literature review, theoretical analysis and prototype system development Findings: Application of Web services hold promise for distributed resource sharing and collaborative environmental planning. Web services wrap various geo-processing services and avoid problems of tightly coupled distributed object techniques and expose an application programming interface over the Web. Thus, Web service provides promising tools for dynamic composition of complex geospatial services for collaborative environmental planning. By wrapping geo-processing services of interoperable standards of XML and SOAP, we demonstrate a prototype implementation of environmental decision support systems GEO-ELCA (Exploratory Land Use Change Analysis) where Web service-enabled middleware adds core functionality to a Web mapping service. The system demonstrates how geo-processing services can be integrated with environmental simulation models using OGC (Open GIS Consortium) compliant connectors that support WMS (Web Mapping Service) and WPS (Web Processing Services). Implications for practice: The findings will have implications for system analysis and design of Web-based spatial decision support system for decentralized planning and organizational policy formulation e.g., in formulating multiattribute decision rules (discrete choice model) or Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) for comparing relative efficiencies of different planning units.