Combining OGC WCS with SOAP to faciliate the retrieval of remote sensing imagery about agricultural fields

The timely retrieval of remote sensing imagery by farmers and decision makers is very important for current agricultural activities. Through the various kinds of imageries of agricultural fields, people can conclude the status of the fields and figure out what kind of crops are suitable and how to cultivate and irrigate the fields. This paper demonstrates how to take advantage of open web service standards and protocols to facilitate the delivery of imagery to agricultural users. Particularly, OGC WCS standard and SOAP protocol are adopted to realize this capability. WCS is used to provide an interoperable interface for endpoint users to manipulate certain raster datasets in the form of coverages. SOAP provides a XML-based, lightweight and end-to-end information exchange protocol in distributed environment. A combination of WCS and SOAP ensures the remote sensing imageries can be easily and securely delivered from server to endpoint users. The operations in WCS also support endpoint users to simply process the coverages on the client side. We implemented a WCS with SOAP proxy on a public server and experimented the service with the LandSat dataset, USGS Global SRTM dataset, global VCI dataset and U.S. CDL. The results prove that SOAP enabled WCS can faciliate the timely retrieval of remote sensing imageries for agricultural users.