Design a service oriented customizable framework to manipulate GIS data.
Introduction
Geographical Information Systems are found in all over the world. The services provided by each of these systems may vary according to the purpose of service providers and as well as service consumers. In most of these services there should be an underlying mechanism of manipulating geographic data and presenting the processed information over those data to outside world.
There are numerous kinds of frame works and services designed by various interested groups around the world to support geospatial data. Most of them are provided by proprietary organizations. Further, these proprietary frameworks are expensive, have various limitations are capable in utilizing only the products belong to corresponding organization.
On the other hand even there are frameworks designed by open source communities, dealing with those software is quite hard. Hence users have to get over a lot of difficulties when customizing existing functions to be suited to their needs.
Therefore, it is clear that there is a need of a customizable framework which can be used with both proprietary and open source GIS products to manipulate GIS data and exposing those facilities by mean of a web service.
Objective
In this project it is intended to design a customizable frame work, where the capabilities of certain GIS tools and utilities are wrapped into functions and procedures and then make available through a web service. Hence the opportunity of utilizing these functions is offered to users via web instead of working with a stand alone application. User will be able to sort out the most appropriate services out of the available services and customize his/her applications in an easier manner.
In addition to above, service could be further extended as business service. By making the framework service oriented the available facilities could be combined to make large number of business applications and on the top of available services by searching a directory service in which users could deploy and publish there own GIS business services.
Scope
As the initial step the application framework will be designed to wrap tools and utilities provided with UMN Map Server package such as gdal-ogr, mapserver, shapelib etc. Then it is being integrated with the application web service.
The architecture of the business service is concerned in the second phase. The directory service will be implemented as a facilitating sub module of it.
A diagram of the proposed architecture of the project is given below.
References
[1] GIS Service Oriented Architecture, http://complexity.ucs.indiana.edu/~asayar/gisgrids/docs/gis-soa.pdf
[2] ESRI, Geospatial Service-Oriented Architecture, June 2007 www.esri.com/library/whitepapers/pdfs/geospatial-soa.pdf
[3] Zhong-Ren Peng, Services-Oriented Architecture in Internet GIS http://www.gisdevelopment.net/magazine/years/2005/oct/webgis1.htm
