Geoprocessing Services Over the Web

Spatial Data Infrastructures served through the web combined with the ever increasing network and telecommunication capabilities, and made geospatial data largely available over the last several years. In addition, providing semantic specifications to geospatial information, data sharing and interoperability has also been achieved. The next step was to combine spatial data from different sources and apply composite geoprocesses, in order to produce geoinformation over the web, directly available and applicable to a wide range of geo-activities of significant importance for the research and industry community. Towards this direction, the Open Geospatial Consortium has instituted the Web Processing Service standard, in order to define the rules for handling web geoprocesses as web services. In this context, this paper aims to review and identify the available and directly exploitable spatial data infrastructures and related geoprocesses. Furthermore, it aims to propose potential web processes for producing valuable geoinformation, focusing on those applicable to satellite images and relevant to remote sensing, such as image composition, Normalized Difference Vegetation Index calculation, change detection, raster limitation etc.