WPS ENABLED SDI: AN OPEN SOURCE APPROACH TO PROVIDE GEOPROCESSING IN WEB ENVIRONMENT

Sharing and management of geospatial data among different communities and users is a challenge which is suitably addressed by Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). SDI helps people in the discovery, editing, processing and visualization of spatial data. The user can download the data from SDI and process it using the local resources. However, large volume and heterogeneity of data make this processing difficult at the client end. This problem can be resolved by orchestrating the Web Processing Service (WPS) with SDI. WPS is a service interface through which geoprocessing can be done over the internet. In this paper, a WPS enabled SDI framework with OGC compliant services is conceptualized and developed. It is based on the three tier client server architecture. OGC services are provided through GeoServer. WPS extension of GeoServer is used to perform geospatial data processing and analysis. The developed framework is utilized to create a public health SDI prototype using Open Source Software (OSS). The integration of WPS with SDI demonstrates how the various data analysis operations of WPS can be performed over the web on distributed data sources provided by SDI.