The 52°North WPS implementation shares one important property with the specification – it is very flexible and can be used for many different use cases. A number of parties contribute, which results in a number of active development branches for code. We will present a selection in blog posts over the next few months.
Processing for Aviation data.
In the scope of the overall succesful OWS-9 testbed 52°North developed a set of processes to support Client software settled in the Aviation domain. This article provides an overview on these processes and common use cases.
Aviation service architectures are naturally highly distributed service-oriented architectures. Common data is provided through Web Feature Services (WFS), updates on data can be obtained through Event Services (ES). All of these are made available through dedicated registries such as the Catalogue Service for the Web (CSW). Starting with OWS-9, the Aviation thread decided to integrate Web Processing Services into this heterogeneous service landscape. The WPS has been identified to provide support for classic Client use cases such as identifying certain airspaces which intersect a flight route (performed by pilots and flight dispatchers).
The OWS-9 Aviation architecture is heavily based on the Aeronautical Information Exchange Model (AIXM), version 5.1. Consequently, our implementation includes parsers for specific AIXM features, currently limited to Airspace and RouteSegment features. The developed processes and algorithms provide classic geospatial computations such as the evaluation of spatial relations (e.g. Airspace A intersects RouteSegment B) and the calculation of the intersection geometries.
All developed processes are backed by an ArcGIS Server 10.0 to support robust and precise geometry calculations. A useful by-product of the OWS-9 activities was the enhanced maturity of the ArcGIS Server backend. The WPS AGS module now supports caching of ServerContext objects to improve the performance of the AGS bridge.
A demo instance of the Aviation-enabled WPS is available at http://geoprocessing.demo.52north.org:8080/aviation-wps.
If you are interested in the sources, be sure to visit our dedicated GitHub-Project. It also provides insights on how to extend the WPS based on a well-structured maven project setup. It has recently been moved from a WPS branch to GitHub.
This post will be updated as soon as the official OWS-9 demonstration page – featuring the 52°North WPS for Aviation – is online.
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