G-WSDL: a data-oriented approach to model GIS Web services

GIS Web service turns out to be one of the new directions of the paradigm of GIS, due to the popular use of the Internet and the dramatic progress of telecommunications technology. However, focused on the description of the interface of functions by Web service description language (WSDL), the general Web service technologies are not sufficient to model GIS Web service with data-oriented characteristic, especially those data provider services and data transform services. In this paper, we propose geographic-Web service description language (abbr. G-WSDL) which enhances the ability of describing such data-driven services by extending the current WSDL with service metadata. Two application scenarios will be presented at last to show its strength in automatic GIS Web service discovery and dynamic services combination.