Building an On-line Geospatial Analysis System with AJAX and Web Services

Abstract

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), and other new Web technologies have revolutionized the use of geospatial Web applications. The GeoBrain project has built a powerful online extensible and scalable geospatial analysis system based on SOA. This system utilizes Web Services and AJAX to increase the interactive capabilities of user interfaces and improve the user experience. It provides Geosciences community a highly interoperable way of accessing Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web services for geospatial data discovery, retrieval, visualization and analysis. It also leverages Web service standards to enable geospatial services discovery, selection, negotiation and invocation to be used in making more informed decisions.