An optimized framework for seamlessly integrating OGC Web Services to support geospatial sciences

OGC Web Services (OWS) are essential building blocks for the national and global spatial data infrastructure (NSDI and GSDI) and the geospatial cyberinfrastructure (GCI). Web Map Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS), Web Coverage Service (WCS), and Catalogue Service for Web (CSW) have been increasingly adopted to serve scientific data. Interoperable services can facilitate the integration of different scientific applications by searching, finding, and utilizing the large number of scientific data and Web services. However, these services are widely dispersed and hard to be found and utilized with acceptable performance. This is especially true when developing a science application to seamlessly integrate multiple geographically dispersed services. Focusing on the integration of distributed OWS resources, we propose a layer-based service-oriented integration framework and relevant optimization technologies to search and utilize relevant resources. Specifically, (1) an AJAX (Asynchronous JAvaScript and eXtensible Markup Language)-based synchronous multi-catalogue search is proposed and utilized to enhance the multi-catalogue searching performance; (2) a layer-based search engine with spatial, temporal, and performance criteria is proposed and used for identifying better services; (3) a service capabilities clearinghouse (SCCH) is proposed and developed to address the service issues identified by a statistical experiment. A science application of data correlation analysis is used as an example to demonstrate the performance enhancement of the proposed framework.