Web services enabled architecture coupling data and functional resources

Abstract

Web services are the backbone of WISDOM system, an information and visualisation system supporting decision makers in the fields of water related management processes based on open source technologies. They enable the distributed and loosely coupled, component based architecture of the system. In cooperating OGC compliant web services for data access, visualisation and data processing the system is extendible to external data resources and other proprietary software solutions. The base idea behind the designed and prototypically implemented WISDOM techniques is the orchestration of decoupled web resources representing data sets and functionality to model more complex business processes quite easily. The system covers most aspects of administrative business processes including spatial and non-spatial data ingestion and dissemination, necessary data processing and visualisation techniques. In combination with a semantics enabled data management WISDOM system is capable to produce value added information products to water management related tasks autonomously. These compound data and processing resource chains are implemented to facilitate certain identified business processes in regional administration. Clients like data and information explorers supporting manual interaction as human machine interfaces or automated data access of value adding operations accomplish, respectively trigger these integrative chains. As an example the same data and processing infrastructure is used to visualise data in map clients as WMS or access data as WCS, resp. WFS for further processing which can furthermore trigger additional actions like feeding reports or requesting auxiliary data.