GeoPWTManager: a task-oriented web geoprocessing system

Recent advancement of geospatial services has shown great promise to solve complex geoprocessing tasks in a distributed environment. Geoprocessing services are often chained as scientific workflows and executed in a workflow engine. This paper proposes a task-oriented architecture for Web geoprocessing systems, which leverages Web service and workflow technologies to design and execute tasks, and monitor and visualize the execution of tasks. The approach facilitates the expression of users' requirements, allows the monitoring of the task execution, and hides the complexity of technical details. A prototype system, named GeoPWTManager, is implemented to demonstrate the applicability of the approach. (c) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.