52°North has successfully participated as a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code for the eighth year in a row. Two students worked with us over the summer and helped improve the enviroCar UI / UX and create a WPS Client for ArcGIS Pro. This year’s Mentor Summit took place in Munich, Germany.
OGC Testbed 13 Engineering Reports available to the public
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.
WPS at FOSSGIS 2014
Two weeks ago at this year’s FOSSGIS conference, I presented some news regarding the 52°North WPS project and also about the OGC WPS standard.
News from the WPS project
I talked about the move to GitHub and the new project procedures that accompany this move.
I also presented the lightweight JavaScript WPS client that was developed in the GeoViQua project.
You can find more information about it here: wps-js.
I showed the new admin application that was developed during last year’s Google Summer of Code.
This was presented in several blog posts before and will hopefully be included in a future WPS release.
The next topic was the current developments in OGC Testbed (OWS) 10, namely the RDF (Resource Description Framework) provenance encoding that was developed within the project. To learn about the basics of provenance in our context, you can have a look in this OGC Public Engineering Report(ER). The ER sums up the developments of the previous testbed, where we implemented XML-based provenance information as addidtional WPS output.
Introducing the new ArcMap WPS Client(s)
Introduction
A Web Processing Service is little without a client. We have developed various clients ourselves in the past, but most of the projects have been discontinued. We developed a prototypical WPS client for ArcMap, however this was never deemed ready to be released. Another open source client we came across is the Quantum GIS WPS client. It works with several WPS implementations and also supports data streaming (see this post). Last year the Ordnance Survey of the U.K. approached us. They use WPS for web-based generalization of vector data. On the client side they use a plugin for OpenJUMP. They then wanted to make the Web Gen WPS accessible from additional GIS platforms and chose ArcGIS as the next target platform. Our mission was to mature our existing prototypical ArcMap WPS client and enable it to work with the WebGen WPS. The existing OpenJUMP client for WebGen WPS is limited to WebGen WPS. It is common that WPS clients can only connect to specific WPS instances, due to the openness of the WPS standard regarding input and output data types. There is practically no limit to what a complex input/output can be. Therefore, a client that needs to handle these inputs and outputs can not support all possible data types. The idea for an Extensible WPS ArcMap client was born.
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