The development of geospatial web services by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has made it possible for Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and related applications to retrieve, process and manage data remotely through the World Wide Web. OGC web services were primarily intended for improving capabilities for data dissemination. However, there is a growing appreciation of the possibility of server-side processing of data through web services. Further, the possibility of integrating OGC web services with web services based on the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA) offers a variety of computational resources. Such processing can involve the chaining of operations through web service orchestration. Each orchestration can be deployed in a workflow engine which then allows the workflow to be enacted. In handling geospatial data, geosemantics play a role in the validity of chains of operations. Therefore, semantic awareness is necessary to ensure that a geospatial workflow is both structurally and semantically valid.
We are therefore interested in using the potential of workflow engines in the orchestration of OGC services and to demonstrate the capability of such developed systems in real-world applications. It is particularly appropriate to address this now, as OGC web services and OGSA web services are converging in their approach to data handling and processing, and the OGC is engaged in activity designed to develop service-based processing of geographic information through a specific Web Processing Service (WPS).
SAW-GEO started in October 2006 and will run until May 2008.