Chih-Yuan Chen, Chen-Chieh Feng and Juebo Wu, 4th Digital Earth Summit 2012, Wellington, New Zealand, 2 - 4 September, 2012. 



Abstract:

 Spatial data infrastructure has enabled acquiring spatial data, composing geospatial service functions, and using processing services on the web. However, providing a suitable means to assess the reliability of the data sources and the quality of services remain challenging because information regarding the analytical workflow is often not well recorded. As such, our ability to determine the level of similarity between existing geospatial workflows and the workflow suitable for carrying out particular digital data manipulations, the adjustments needed for adapting one or more existing geospatial workflows to a chosen work, and the way existing geospatial workflows should be combined, is rather limited. Spatial provenance, which refers to the information of spatial data lineage and related analysis workflow, has become increasing important in this context because it provides infrastructural supports to handle these issues.
In this work we develop a provenance framework for managing geospatial web processing workflows. It provides enhanced capability to search, adapt, and reuse the existing geospatial workflow based on a geospatial application ontology. The framework adapts generic provenance models Open Provenance Model (OPM) and W7 for encoding spatial provenance. Combined with the geospatial application ontology, the framework provides better quality of services by making suggestions of possible adjustments or combinations of the existing workflow. We are developing a proof-of-concept system based on the proposed framework, which includes data and service broker, geospatial application ontology database, and provenance repository for geospatial workflow. The data and service broker is for registering, discovering, visualizing, composing, and executing web services. The geospatial application ontology database defines the concepts and relations of geospatial data and workflow in order to support the reasoning of the workflow reproduction. The provenance repository records the OPM and W7 models information of the workflow.



Keywords:spatial data infrastructure, provenance, web processing workflows, ontology, GIS, open provenance model.
 
Conference website:http://www.digitalearth12.org.nz/