Global Positioning System Reference
In-Depth Information
The overall aim of the present topic fi ts nicely into the earlier UN
GGIM vision, and surely other chapters will be reporting on hybridizations
of these technologies such as Linked Geo Data and Cloud GIS. In this
chapter we also adhere to this vision and report on the interplay between
geoprocessing services and workfl ow systems as a new way to leverage geo-
enabled workfl ows on the Web to support a vast array of scientifi c activities
such as environmental modeling, simulation, and data visualization. Our
exposition, though, is driven by the research question in the chapter title
in the form of mathematical equation. We are questioning whether the
robustness of workfl ow systems in conjunction with the fl exibility exposed
by geoprocessing web services
may
lead to the geo-enabled Model Web,
which essentially is a novel approach that treats models as services and
combination of models as composition of web services.
This chapter begins by briefl y exploring the concept of modeling in
geosciences which notably benefi ts from advances on the integration of
geoprocessing services and workfl ow systems. In “The State of the Art
Section”, we provide a comprehensive background on the technology
trends we treat in the chapter. On one hand we deal with workfl ow
systems, categorized normally in the literature as scientifi c and business
workfl ow systems (Barga and Gannon 2007). In particular, we introduce
some prominent examples of scientifi c workfl ow systems—Kepler, Taverna,
and VisTrails—and descriptive languages for modeling business workfl ows,
namely BPMN and WS-BPEL. On the other hand, we visit the notion of
geoprocessing web services—mainly interfaced by the Web Processing
Service and Web Service Description Language specifi cations. After the
current state of the art, we identify recent works that merge geoprocessing
service technologies with scientifi c and business workfl ow systems to
varying environmental modeling scenarios. Based on the earlier analysis,
in “Towards the Geo-enabled Model Web Section” we introduce the notion
of Geo-enabled Model Web to shape geo-enabled workfl ows on the Web,
and raise some challenges that need to be addressed to promote robust and
fl exible tools for realizing the Model Web vision. Finally, some concluding
recommendations are formulated.
The Role of Modelling for Geosciences
Modeling is a powerful tool in geosciences to understand the Earth and
our environment. A model basically mimics and simplifi es a natural system
or a part of it (e.g., climate, ecosystems, watershed, and atmosphere), as
Figure 1 illustrates. The analysis of complex natural phenomena, such as
the examples above, requires the combination of several models that may
even span over multiple disciplines (biodiversity, water, ocean, agriculture,
etc.). The notion of Integrated Modeling (IM) captures exactly this. Rotmans
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