ZOO-Project: the open WPS platform

This paper aims to present the ZOO-Project, which is a new open source implementation of the Open Geospatial Consortium's (OGC) Web Processing Service (WPS), released under the term of the MIT/X-11 license. Based on a server-side C language Kernel (named ZOOKernel), ZOO-Project proposes a new approach to develop, handle and chain standardized GIS-based Web services. A brief review of WPS and existing implementations will be given in order to detail the ZOO-Project development background and goals. Then, the ZOO itself will be presented, focusing on its advantages and limitations, foremost to highlight the new opportunities provided by such a platform. The ZOO-Kernel and its architecture will be first examined, before further explanations on the proposed method for Web services creation are given. Then the ZOO JavaScript API that provides a new way to orchestrate and chainWeb services through the server-side JavaScript will be presented next. Both Kernel and API are illustrated and documented through different Web service code snippets that are available online. Some visual examples of client-side interactions are presented.