Customizable virtual geospatial products at web/grid service environment

This paper presents a schema for virtualization of customizable geospatial products at service-oriented geospatial knowledge systems. It discusses concepts of virtual geospatial products, geospatial processing models, GeoTree, and geoobjects, as well as differences between geospatial product type and instance, the relationship between geospatial processing models and virtual geospatial products, the representation of virtual geospatial products, and automatic creation of workflows from geospatial processing models. It also discusses steps from knowledge capture for the construction of geospatial processing models to the materialization of virtual geospatial products and why geospatial processing models should be defined at the type level instead of instance level for product virtualization. Some implementation considerations for the product virtualization in service-oriented geospatial knowledge systems at the Web/Grid service environment are presented.