Hierarchical profiling of geoprocessing services

This paper reviews previous work in the field of service-oriented geoprocessing and discusses their contributions towards interoperable and well-defined processing services. Based on these findings, a framework is proposed that captures both semantic and syntactic properties of geoprocessing functions at different levels of granularity. Each of the levels is associated with a set of descriptive artifacts that refine the definitions of coarser levels, ultimately leading to well-defined implementations. The utility of the framework is illustrated for task-oriented search and workflow verification. Finally the paper discusses possible limitations of the presented approach and provides suggestions for future work.