Assessment of OGC Web Processing Services for REST principles

TL;DR

This paper evaluates whether OGC Web Processing Services align with REST principles, highlighting potential benefits for geospatial service composition and suggesting improvements for web-based geospatial applications.

Contribution

It provides an assessment of WPS against REST principles, offering insights into enhancing geospatial web services using RESTful architecture.

Findings

WPS has limited RESTful features.

REST principles can improve service composition.

Adopting REST may benefit non-expert users.

Abstract

Recent distributed computing trends advocate the use of Representational State Transfer (REST) to alleviate the inherent complexity of the Web services standards in building service-oriented web applications. In this paper we focus on the particular case of geospatial services interfaced by the OGC Web Processing Service (WPS) specification in order to assess whether WPS-based geospatial services can be viewed from the architectural principles exposed in REST. Our concluding remarks suggest that the adoption of REST principles, to specially harness the built-in mechanisms of the HTTP application protocol, may be beneficial in scenarios where ad hoc composition of geoprocessing services are required, common for most non-expert users of geospatial information infrastructures.