Increasingly complex environmental problems and the growth in accessible geospatial data in interoperable formats is leading to the investigation of Grid processing as a potential tool for advanced geo-processing within a standards-based environment. The OGC Web Processing Service (WPS) is an open standardised interface for geo-processing, compatible with technologies being adopted by spatial data infrastructures. We investigate the integration of Grid computing capability within a WPS.
Our approach is based on the use of the Job Submission Description Language (JSDL) being developed by the Grid community as a standardised description of computational jobs to be executed on heterogeneous Grid platforms. We develop a mechanism to integrate JSDL resource requirement descriptors within a standard WPS request, and show how process execution and status querying may be proxied to a Grid environment through the WPS interface. A proof-of-concept implementation is developed using an atmospheric particle tracing application and the UK National Grid Service.

Artikelauszug / Extract:

1. INTRODUCTION
The Geospatial community requires an ability to analyse and process geographic datasets using a combination of spatial software and analytical methods. Increasingly complex geo-processing operations are driving a demand for greater computing capability – it is no longer always possible to rely on a desktop GIS to perform spatial analysis of interest, especially where very large datasets are concerned, or the results of complex simulation models need to be integrated.

Schlüsselwörter: Grid, OGC, Web Processing Service, WPS, Job Submission Description language, JSDL, spatial data infrastructure