WPS – A Web Processing Service standard

The WPS (Web Processing Service) standard has been approved by the OGC recently.

“WPS defines a standardized interface that facilitates the publishing of geospatial processes, and the discovery of and binding to those processes by clients. ―Processes‖ include any algorithm, calculation or model that operates on spatially referenced data. ―Publishing‖ means making available machine-readable binding information as well as human-readable metadata that allows service discovery and use.”

The WPS interface specifies three operations

• GetCapabilities (inherited by the OGCWebService interface)– This operation allows a client to request and receive back service metadata (or Capabilities) documents that describe the abilities of the specific server implementation. The GetCapabilities operation provides the names and general descriptions of each of the processes offered by a WPS instance. This operation also supports negotiation of the specification version being used for client-server interactions.
• DescribeProcess – This operation allows a client to request and receive back detailed information about the processes that can be run on the service instance, including the inputs required, their allowable formats, and the outputs that can be produced.
• Execute – This operation allows a client to run a specified process implemented by the WPS, using provided input parameter values and returning the outputs produced.

 

Even though, we are having a hard time working with ArcGIS Server’s GeoProcessing Service and haven’t heard too many good things about it, it would be nice to see ESRI the WPS standard in its GeoProcessing Service.