Tracking Dynamics of Geospatial Phenomena in Distributed and Heterogeneous Environments Using Scientific Workflow and Web Services Technologies

Abstract

We propose to use W3C Web Services and recently emerging scientific workflow technologies for geospatial data processing in distributed and heterogeneous computation environments. The Web service technology provides platform independence and greater interoperability; the scientific workflow technology provides software reuse and visual programming. We demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach using storm dynamics tracking from weather radar data as an example. Technical details of algorithm development, Web services publishing, workflow composition and execution for the demonstrative example are discussed.

A practical approach to developing a web-based geospatial workflow composition and execution system

“…In the context of Kepler scientific workflow applications, we have proposed a scientific workflow approach to distributed geospatial data processing using Web services [21]. The approach has been applied to species distribution modeling [22], biodiversity explorations [23] and storm tracking [24]. Additional geospatial applications using the Kepler SWF system have been reported in [25,26].…”