Designing and Developing a Standards-based Interoperable Framework for Integrating Geoprocessing Services (Case Study: Landslide Susceptibility Mapping)

Nowadays، geologic hazards are mainly considered as natural sources of devastation around the world. For effective reduction of such hazards and enhancement of situation awareness as well as better decision making for urban planning and soon، the environmental management systems should be designed and implemented. Recent developments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have provided the fundamental infrastructure for building loosely coupled، distributed environmental management systems to support comprehensive environmental modeling. One of the main technical challenges in developing such GIS based systems is integrating large amounts of distributed geospatial resources (data and services) which are non-compliant to standards. This paper proposes a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) as an efficient solution for the mentioned problem. It provides a novel implementation strategy that addresses the issues of distributed processing and service interoperability for environmental models. In this research، the authors have designed and developed a standards-based، service oriented application called Landslide Susceptibility Analyzer to generate landslide susceptibility map based on users’ preferences. Web services technology and OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) and WPS (Web Processing Service) standard specification have been used to implement the required components of the geoprocessing engine. Google Maps API and Web client technologies have been used at the client-side to provide interactive user interface، too. The evaluation of prototype system proved that the proposed architecture can improve integrating of distributed geospatial services، both in terms of reusability and performance، in environmental modeling applications. The conclusions have also showed that coupling the Web services technology with OGC framework provides standards-based، interoperable services facilitating access، processing، and visualization of geospatial data to support effective decision making either in case of an emergency or in advance planning.