Design and implementation of an on-demand feature extraction web service to facilitate development of spatial data infrastructures

One of the main problems in urban and environmental management concerns the unavailability of reliable spatial data in a spatial data infrastructure (SDI) environment. The main reason for the problem of spatial data availability is the time-consuming nature of their manual production. The present paper proposes the development of on-demand data production Web services for the Internet using feature extraction techniques from satellite images as a solution to the problem. Such services allow users to connect to an on-demand data production Web service to produce the required data automatically if the users cannot find the required spatial data. In order to address and investigate this suggestion, a prototype system is developed. We have developed and implemented a system for automatic road extraction and describe it in special detail with a case study. Web service technologies and OGC (open geospatial consortium) frameworks are utilized for the development of the system to satisfy data and access interoperability in a SDI environment. The paper explains that the on-demand feature extraction Web service can facilitate the development of SDI by resolving the problem of spatial data availability. It also describes further research and different topics that should be considered in the development of SDIs to make such Web services operational.