A geospatial service approach for debris flow early-warning systems

Disaster prevention and management is a complicated task that often involves a tremendous amount of heterogeneous data from various resources. With its spatial, dynamic, and distributed nature, service technology has become a good candidate for removing the communication barriers between various organizations and for facilitating the integration and sharing of distributed data. For it to succeed, however, a consensus agreement on how geospatial data is distributed and processed must be first established. In the GIS (Geographic Information System) domain, the OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) has proposed service standards like WMS, WFS, WCS, and WPS to serve as the foundation for the distribution and processing of geospatial data in an open data format, but how service technology can be fit into current applications has been left for domain developers to explore. A service-based system prototype for debris flow early-warning systems is proposed and tested in this paper. This task typically requires geospatial datasets produced by various organizations to be integrated, some of which is constantly updated during the process. A practical implementation indicates that the proposed architecture can facilitate the distribution of heterogeneous geospatial data as well as meet the needs for instantaneous data exchange. Compared to the traditional manual batch-processing approach, the service-based approach offers better interoperability for the distribution and processing of geospatial data.