52°North successfully participated in the OGC Testbed 13. OGC Testbeds define a set of requirements in which OGC service implementors test the applicability of their services in real live scenarios and how well they work with other client and service implementations. They are sponsored by Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) members from industry and government organizations. 52°North edited and contributed to Engineering Reports about geoprocessing workflows and related security aspects, as well as fit-for-purpose workflows and asynchronous services.

52°North’s Benjamin Pross and Christoph Stasch edited the OGC Testbed 13: Workflows ER, which describes the results of work done on geospatial workflows. As in previous years, 52°North worked on the topic of geospatial workflows, i.e. executing different WPS processes to create a final data set. The workflow in Testbed 13 involved different processing steps including data quality checks and the conflation (fusion) of different road data sets. The workflow was defined in the BPMN and a transactional WPS was developed that allows uploading BPMN documents to execute workflows via Execute operations subsequently. We used the Camunda BPMN Engine for the workflow execution. The following figure shows the coarse architecture:

 

An alternative workflow scenario is depicted in the OGC Testbed 13: Fit-for-Purpose Engineering Report. In this case, an OWS Context Document was used to execute a workflow with pre-defined datasets. One core result of the workflow activities is a change request for a transactional WPS that provides an interface to deploy new processing functionality.  The OGC Testbed 13: Application Deployment and Execution Service Engineering Report also describes transactional mechanisms for WPS.

Security aspects also played a major role in the workflow activities. A requirement stated that the data and processing services involved be protected by different security mechanisms, such as OAuth 2.0 and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Identity and Access Management (IAM). We used the Camunda BPMN Engine for the workflow execution. The security aspects are also described in the OGC Testbed 13: Security ER. Furthermore, 52°North developed a concept for an OAuth-enabled Web Processing Service, which is also described in the Security ER.

Christoph Stasch and Benjamin Pross also edited the OGC Testbed 13: Asynchronous Services ER. It describes how OGC data services can be accessed in an asynchronous fashion.

It was an intense Testbed with complex requirements that 52°North and the other participants successfully met. Many things are still left to do, so we are looking forward to participating in Testbed 14 (application is pending).

More information about OGC Testbed 13 can be found here. Please check the complete list of the Testbed 13 Engineering Reports.