SUIS: Simplify the use of geospatial web services in environmental modelling

Today environmental scientists heavily rely on geospatial web services (GWS). However, many online facilities are under-utilized by the environmental modelling community because accessing the disparate service interfaces requires highly specialized technical expertise. This paper proposes a Simple Universal Interface for Services (SUIS) framework which is a client framework for accessing heterogeneous services via a single unified interface to simplify service access. The supported services including Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Representational State Transfer (REST) services. SUIS relieves modellers from having to learn the details of service technologies such as protocols, bindings, and schemas. SUIS4j, a Java implementation of the SUIS framework, is developed and tested to combine multiple operational GWS to demonstrate geoprocessing workflows in agricultural drought monitoring and coastal ocean modelling. The results confirm the expected benefits. SUIS is demonstrated to support simplified use of geospatial cyberinfrastructure for ad-hoc environmental model integration.