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 present a selection in blog posts in the series “A look into WPS branches”.
Conflation With Provenance – Custom WPS Processes
Similar to the efforts on Aviation-specific processing, 52°North developed processes for conflating two distinct data sets in the scope of the OWS 9 test bed. This article sheds some light on the details of the processes and the obstacles which need to be overcome.
Conflation is understood as a sophisticated process of unifying two or more separate data sets that share certain characteristics into one integrated all-encompassing dataset. In the process, different representations of a feature get folded into one feature. That target feature follows a particular model that is used to capture complementary information. In addition to the actual dataset conflation, the consistent capturing of provenance information was another goal of the project. The conflation processes developed represent a very customized and complex workflow. The test bed proved that the 52°North WPS framework fits perfectly into such use cases by providing an individual and flexible processing API.