Hierarchical profiling of geoprocessing services

Analysis workflows in geoinformation systems and geodata infrastructures are built from reusable geoprocessing services. Ideally, these services are well-defined implementations which can be readily understood by clients in order to find and invoke the right service for a particular task. Despite technological advances towards service-oriented architectures, implementation uncertainty is still an issue and most geoprocessing services lack solid and meaningful descriptions of the provided functionality. This paper reviews previous work in the field of service-oriented geoprocessing and discusses their contributions towards interoperable and well-defined processing services. Based on these findings, a framework is proposed that captures both semantic and syntactic properties of geoprocessing functions at different levels of granularity. Each of the levels is associated with a set of descriptive artifacts that refine the definitions of coarser levels, ultimately leading to well-defined implementations. The utility of the framework is illustrated for task-oriented search and workflow verification. Finally the paper discusses possible limitations of the presented approach and provides suggestions for future work. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.