Abstract:
An intelligent geoportal orchestrates (automatically coordinate) web services to prepare,
discover and present information to the user. Implementations of web service standards by the
Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and ISO/TC 211, Geographic information/Geomatics, such
as, the Web Map Service (WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS) and Styled Layer Descriptor
(SLD) enable the display of spatial data in a geoportal. Ultimately, our goal is to intelligently
orchestrate web services to produce thematic maps. As a first step towards our ultimate goal, in
this article, we present the results of experiments with the orchestration of OGC web services to
produce thematic maps. Our goal here was to evaluate whether orchestrating OGC web
services can produce thematic maps. The results prove that this is possible, but show that there
is customised functionality that has to be wrapped into WPSs. This poses a challenge to on the
fly intelligent orchestration, which is required in an intelligent geoportal.
