Research On The Selection Of GIS Web Services

For the past few years, with the popularity of Internet and the development ofcomputer technology, earth-shaking changes have also taken place in the geographicinformation systems (GIS) field. Because of the combination with Web servicestechnology, GIS is transforming from its traditional senses to the geographic informationservices, which means that GIS vendors deliver the application package to the internet asWeb services instead of selling GIS softwares, and in this way the customers can accessand use what they really demand.As GIS becomes to provide Web services, the related problems are emerging oneafter another. Because the Web services of geographic information on the Internet aremassive, the users need a selection mechanism to support, which can meet the users’satisfaction and choose the suitable one in the face of a large number of the same orsimilar Web services.Based on the analysis of current domestic and international selection technology ofWeb service and the characteristics of geographic information Web service, this paperproposes that both the functional and non-functional aspects of Web services should betaken into account in the selection, presents a selection model established on this basisand investigates the service selection techniques in the GIS area. The main contents arelisted as follows:(1) The ontology technology supporting semantic description was determined toachieve service matching and selection through the analysis and comparison of currentselection technology. According to the characteristics of geographical information Webservices, the service selection was divided into two stages as functional selection andnon-functional selection, and related theory and technology involved in the two stagesare studied well.(2) As single functional selection is difficult to meet the needs of the user’s ownpreference, this study did some in-depth research on non-functional factors of thegeographic information Web services. On the basis of the characteristics of Web services,this paper suggests that the Quality of Service(QoS) of both geo-spatial data and Webservices should be considered in the non-functional service selection. The ontologymodels that support semantic description with different QoS were anlaysed and compared, which lay a solid foundation for building geospatial data ontology andgeographic information Web service QoS ontology.(3) According to the above theory and technology, this paper presents a selectionmodel of GIS Web service and designs a prototype system based on that model. Thefeasibility of the selection method was validated by relevant simulation tests and thedeficiencies of the experiment were summed up to point out the direction for the futurestudy.