Processing chains with OGC Web Processing Services to process satellite data interactively in a geoportal

In the past standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium in web information systems were commonly integrated for visualizing vector and raster. With the implementation specification of the Web Processing Service (WPS), a standard to process geodata in the web is available. The new possibilities in web-based geographic information systems allow an interoperable processing of different data based on service-orientated architectures.

This presentation describes the implementation of a Web Processing Service to derivate products from satellite data. Software including a WPS was evaluated with focus of handling large data files. Several processes were developed to create products for MODIS satellite data, available on the web. On top of these processes, software for implementing and executing processing chains as a web processing service was evaluated and several chains were implemented.

An automatically running service is processing near-real time data downloaded direct after acquisition. An interface to get and process archived data was integrated in the developed web information system. The user of this system can search interactively for archived MODIS data and process it with the developed web processing services and processing chains.

The software evaluation showed that there is additional work to do to improve the WPS standard. Specific profiles for working with large raster data are needed to define standardised rules. For processing chains no standardised data format describing these chains exist, but it is also possible to create processing chains with several software solutions.

Further conclusions are that there is a high potential in the usage of Web Processing Services and processing chains to add values for data archives with interoperable services. Services can be used for internal processing as well for usage in the public over the web. Additionally, some affort is needed to specify characteristics for fields of application and to create uniform metadata of published processes.