4TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

RECENT PROBLEMS IN GEODESY AND RELATED FIELDS WITH

INTERNATIONAL IMPORTANCE

February 28 - March 2, 2007, Inter Expo Centre, Sofia, Bulgaria

THE DEVELOPING GIS WEB SERVICES FOR

LOCATING FACILITIES

Abolghasem Sadeghi Niaraki, Kyehyun Kim (SKR)

ABSTRACT

This study addresses a research to design and develops GIS web services. A web service is simply
an application that shows a web application program interface. Therefore, the integration of GIS
and web services, called GIS web services, means that GIS can be more widely implemented.
Conventional methods using spatial information for accessing, presenting, and manipulating update
data for locating geo-related facilities for mobile user are inadequate. This study is intended to
examine how the web services work in a GIS for discovering geo-related facilities services such as
restaurant and post office in the vicinity of user’s location. Therefore, a prototype, whose
architecture consists of a windows application in the client side as well as some GIS web services
and GIS engine in server side, were designed and implemented. On both the client and the server
side visual studio .NET technology were used. GIS engine in server side was also built with ESRI’s
MapObjects. The prototype has been effectively implemented in this work. Hence, the mobile
user’s is able to invoke remote web services to assess facilities location (e.g. position of restaurants)
and display the resulted map in the client side. Furthermore, this research has also exposed that web
service is not restricted to just being used on the web. They can be utilized by any application that
has connections to the web. In general, a GIS web services prototype leads to architecture that any
mobile user in it with any platform and programming language can utilize GIS tools in the vicinity
of geo-related facilities like post office. In addition, in this architecture mobile client does not need
to store geospatial data or geoprocessing functions which are very useful for mobile device due to a
more constrained computing environment and fundamental limitations of power and memory.

Keywords: MapObjects; GIS web services; GIS; .Net; geospatial data; geo-related facility services

1. Introduction

Recently, an amount of time has been spent to share geospatial information and geo-related facility
services in the geospatial information environment. This method, called GIS web services, leads to
the manipulation of GI information and GI service with independent language and platform.
Geospatial information is an important resource in decision making and policy support at various
levels of private and public organizations. Geospatial information can be described as any
information, data possessing a positional component which can refer it to a location on the Earth
(Groot 2000). GIS allows storage, editing, maintenance, dissemination, display and access of
geospatial information. A GIS is normally utilized for acquisition, storage, and analysis of
information where geographic location is important for the analysis or to make a model (Aronoff
1995). The combination of geospatial information and GIS has improved the capability of
geospatial information for multiple applications, and is helpful to make decisions at various levels
of organizations and activities (GSDIA 2001). The Internet can be observed as an infrastructure of
shared computing resources and information (Begg 1998). Using the Internet, a network of
computers can currently be exploited as efficiently as a particular computer (Hartman 1997).

The integration of GIS and web started with static map publishing. Static map publishing
distributed maps on the web page as static map images in graphic format. In this environment, users
do not have any ability to manipulate on the maps. In static map publishing the interaction between
the users and the maps on the web browser is limited. After static map publishing, interactive web
mapping technique came with more intelligence on the client side by using scripts like dynamic
HTML and plug-ins, ActiveX controls, and Java applets. After that, a distributed GIS technique
established a direct communication between the GIS server and the client (Peng 2003). It refers to a
distributed platform of accessing and processing geospatial data using distributed GIS service
components through the internet. Distributed GIS services permit GIS components on one side to
communicate with the component on another side. This communication does not require the
components to move through an HTTP server and CGI-related middleware. In contrast, the web
services supply a standard method for enabling communication between applications’ middle tiers
over a network. Unlike DCOM and CORBA, the web services works using open, or non-
proprietary, standards (Deitel et al., 2003).

Conventional techniques are static and file based, so application and data are tightly coupled.
Traditional approach makes many limitations for general users who do not have GIS knowledge for
their geo-related requirements such as accessing geospatial data, managing dynamic data,
representing data, updating data, integrating many datasets, interpreting various services and so on.
Due to these challenges, there is an essential consideration on providing more appropriate
architecture and services for mobile users’ before and during the trip. A web services is basically an
application that represents a web-accessible application program interface. It keeps related source
data and functionality in the server side and proposes the web access to it. Moreover, a web services
is a set of standards that makes applications to achieve interoperability over the web. It has
independent programming language and platform. A web services is a software system designed to
support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network. It has an interface described
in a machine-processable format like WSDL. Other systems interact with the web services in a
manner prescribed by its description using SOAP messages, typically conveyed using HTTP with
an XML serialization in conjunction with other web-related standards (W3C 2004). The web
services architecture enables the internet be a platform for distributing services, not just data. The
integration of GIS and web services, makes GIS be more significantly implemented architecture.
Mapping, data, and geo-processing services are accessible from numerous servers and can be
integrated into a common environment. Moreover, the ability to interoperate and combine
geospatial data makes GIS-based web services exclusive. Interoperability can be described as the
capacity of a system or components of a system to offer information sharing and inter-application
co-operative process control, through a shared request and response mechanisms (Groot 2000).
The purpose of this study is to consider how the GIS web services components works and how one
suitable prototype is implemented to help mobile users in the GIS web services architecture for
using facility services such as restaurant and post office in the vicinity of user’s location. In
addition, a simple client side application is built for testing implemented GIS web services. It has
been found that the web services have a very capable structure for practical implementation of
distributed GIS. Microsoft .NET and ERSI’s MapObjects are appropriate structure components for
such GIS web services Architecture.
2. Related works
Various researches concentrate on the application and analysis of GIS, and not the access or
publishing of geographic information. Actual implementations of the web service recently have
been emerged in such applications as Google web APIs service (Google 2002) and OGC web
services initiative (OGC 2002). The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has successfully steered
the SOAP’s evolution from an HTTP-based RPC mechanism in XML to a leading interoperable
technology with replaceable bindings. The web services technology is a practical engineering result
in the software area. Designs of the web services systems have received attention from both
industrial (Arsanjani 2003, Fremantle 2002, Kleijnen 2003) and academic field (Gibbins 2003, Yin
2001, Zeng 2003). Meantime, the Open GIS Consortium (OGC) has followed web map services
with interoperability of map servers and clients. The first specification on simple web map services
was released in 2000. Currently, the web mapping services standards include the Web Map Service
(WMS) and the Web Feature Service Implementation Specifications (WFS) (OGC 2000).

3. Methodology

This study is intended to implement a GIS web services based upon the following procedure. First
of all, this study was addressed to consider how the web services works in geospatial information
systems and what kind of platforms and technologies of the GIS web services is needed to solve the
mobile user to access to facility services in the surrounding area of user’s location. Secondly, an
appropriate conceptual model was developed to visualize the entities of the GIS web services and
their relationships. Finally, a prototype of the GIS web services and a web service client were
designed and implemented to access geospatial data and geo-related services.

3.1. Web services mechanism

The web services model generally relies on technologies derived from XML (Bray 2000), a
structured language that expands and formalizes HTML. In this regards, the W3C Consortium has
built up SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) (W3C 2000), a communication protocol based on
XML. These days, SOAP is widely taken account of in most of the communication infrastructure
offered for integrating applications and the web services. Besides, languages for describing the web
services have been exploited. The most infamous example is WSDL (Web Service Description
Language) (Christensen), an XML-based language which allows developers to create service
descriptions as a set of operations over SOAP messages. From a WSDL specification, a program
can discover the specific services a web site provides, and how to use and invoke these services. As
a complement to WSDL, UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) (W3C 2001)
has been proposed. UDDI provides mechanisms for searching and publishing services written
preferably in WSDL. The architecture includes three classes of components: service providers,
service requesters and service registries. A service provider produces a WSDL document describing
its web services and publishes this document to a service registry such as UDDI. A service
requester can utilize a registry to discover a web services that matches its requirements and retrieve
the equivalent WSDL document. Using the information proposed by a WSDL document, a service
requester invokes the operations of the web Service provider (Kreger 2001). Actually, a web
services can be defined as a program that carries out a specified action and that can be found,
invoked, and executed over the web. After that, it is relatively uncomplicated for us to define a
geospatial web service. A geospatial web services is a web services which performs an action on
geospatial data or information.
 3.2. GIS web services toolkit
There are various kinds of making web services. Application developers do not have to use a web
services toolkit to build or utilize a web service. Because SOAP is simply an XML based protocol,
it is simple to exploit the SOAP protocol with an HTTP POST, but it would be more complex than
using a toolkit. Microsoft’s .NET as kind of toolkit will offer the user interface, the network
communications, and the component structure to connect the whole system together. Most web
services toolkits are comparatively new, and some are not entirely functional (ArcWeb 2003).
Currently, there are a lot of web services toolkits, such as IBM WebSphere (IBM 2003), Microsoft
Visual Studio .NET (Visual Studio .NET 2003) and GLUE (GLUE 2003). Although they all
provide solutions founded on open standards, such as XML, SOAP, WSDL, UDDI, there are many
differences among them, for example, framework, programming languages, run time, service
discovery, terminology and so forth [Zheng 2005]. One of web Service’s advantages is that web
services allow application developer achieve platform independency as well as language
independency. Regardless of what kind programming software or application software, if it has
ability connect with Internet, it will be allow consuming the web services.

3.3. Conceptual model of the facility services

The conceptual model causes research to be more specific sets of research questions. A conceptual
model cannot be evaluated directly empirically, because it outlines the basis of formulating
empirically testable research questions and hypotheses. It can only be assessed in terms of its
instrumental and heuristic value. Usually, this occurs by assessing the research strategies and results
which it creates (Wagner et al. 1992, Vakkari 1998). Figure 1 depicts the conceptual model of the
GIS web services for mentioned prototype system in this research. This is kind of abstract
architecture which shows essential components of the system and their relationship.

Figure 1: The conceptual model of GIS web services.

3.4. Implementation
The implementation of GIS web services prototype was deployed derived from mentioned
conceptual model to demonstrate the advantages of such a system over the traditional static systems
for accessing the online geospatial data and geo-related services for mobile users. In the GIS web
services architecture, a specific type of relationship has been established between service providers
and service requester to support the dynamic integration of data and services. It is the key to create
facility for mobile users. To design the prototype system, there are the following major
considerations: Firstly, the web service requester part was deployed to invoke geospatial data and
service from the GIS web services. Secondly, the web service provider was deployed for sharing
and managing spatial and services in the web service client (Figure 2). The interaction between a
web service provider and a web service requester was designed independently from platform and
language. Service requesters and providers concern about the interfaces necessary to interact with
each other. As a result, a service requester has no idea how a service provider and a service
requester implements and uses its service. This information is encapsulated inside the requesters
and providers. That encapsulation is critical for decreasing complexity. Using the web services
standards, software components can be accessed by applications developed by customers who it is
independence of hardware, operating system, and programming language (Zhang 2005).

Figure 2: The architecture of GIS web services prototype

3.5. Requester of GIS web service

The WSDL file is used to generate a client-side web service proxy. Then, the service consumer uses
the service description to bind with the web service. Technically, a web service requester can search
and retrieve a service description and the access point to the WSDL file from a service registry such
as UDDI. The web service requester can send a SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) message to
the service provider to invoke a specific method of a web services and receive a SOAP response. A
SOAP message is an XML-based construct that includes an optional SOAP header and a mandatory
SOAP body (Zhang 2005). Figure 3 illustrates the web service client which was designed in VB.Net
in this research. The mobile users send their request to the web services for discovering the favorite
facility (e.g. supermarkets) around their selves. Then User’s position and his selected facility are
sent to the GIS web services to show where his favorite facilities are around himself (Figure 2).
Actually, in the client side there are not any spatial data and GIS service to solve the user’s
requirements. In fact, this is main advantage of the web services technique. In this architecture the
client side is so thin that it is more possible for Mobile devices.

3.6. The structural design of GIS web services

The web service provider here is a software component that offers the GIS web services on the web
(Trastour 2001). The client side can easily invoke the web services to use data and services. The
architecture of web service provider in the GIS web services encompasses three difference sections:
Facility web service, GIS engine, and Image web service (Figure 2). The GIS web services
architecture was deployed using two tools: Microsoft’s .NET (Vb.Net, C#) and ESRI’s
MapObjects. The former provides the user interface, the network communications, and the
component framework to hold the whole system together. The latter provides three basic
components of GIS: data storage, map rendering and spatial analysis. Those two tools are coupled
together; allow the multi-user system to develop as separate and single server-based units (Zheng
2005).

4. Results and Discussions

The prototype of GIS web services has been successfully implemented in this study. In this
prototype the mobile users are able to invoke GIS web services to estimate the facilities location in
the vicinity of user’s position (e.g. location of the nearest supermarket or post office) and display
the resulted map to the client side. Currently, most users do not have enough knowledge to exploit
data for their analysis and information extractions. So lots of valuable data and times are wasted. It
is necessity to build a GIS web services system that can provide valuable information instead of raw
data. Normally, the capability of evolving a system largely depends on the system architecture. In
this research, after designing the conceptual model, the GIS web services architecture was
implemented by component-based prototype, which is modular and self-contained architecture and
can be easily change. The mentioned GIS web services prototype has been concluded to various
results. A facility web service is taken as a main part in our GIS web services (Figure 3). After the
web service client uses and invokes the GIS web services, the facility web service stores the user’s
position and the desired facility in database. Then it leaves the computing operation to a GIS
engine.

Figure 3: The facility web service of GIS web services prototype.

The GIS engine was built by ESRI’s MapObjects, which is a collection of GIS components. It has
been widely used to create specialized GIS desktop applications. MapObjects is an ActiveX
component that lets developer adds specific functions within an application. Then, the GIS engine
can be invoked by the facility web service. After being invoked, the GIS engine can obtain the
users’ position and the facility type which are normally saved in image file format. Due to the
facility web service cannot convey image file to the web service client side directly, the image file
has to send to the client part through another web service, image web service. Image web service
keeps image file in a memory stream, and encodes stream to a string, a kind of text format (Figure
4).

Figure 4: The encoding image file to text format.

The web service client converts the encoded SOAP message into image. So, the users can easily get
their geo-related requirement in client side without having any geospatial data or GIS software and
only need select the facility type that can receive GIS map. Actually all geospatial data processing
are computed in server side and only SOAP message that is kinds of text format has been sent it
back to the client. Figure 5 shows the results of geo-related user request in client side. As matter of
fact, the user can find the facility (e.g. supermarket) around himself without having any GIS data or
function in his device. This is one of the best architecture for mobile device which have enough
memory space to install GIS software and store geospatial dataset.

Figure 5: The final map result of mobile user in client side.

Although, there are many kinds of XML-based web services protocols such as XML-RPC, Jabber,
and ebXML but SOAP is the most popular one. It is not only a protocol that describes how
messages are sent to and from the web services but also a simple XML based protocol to let
applications exchange information over HTTP (SOAP 2003). In this research the .NET which
executes the method using the appropriate protocols, was used. However, instead of .Net
environment, the invoking application can utilize other technique like JavaScript in a window
browser or SOAP toolkits and so on. The SOAP toolkit provided by a variety of vendors sends and
use HTTP GET/POST requests directly in the server and ASP.NET on the server side interprets
them and automatically connects the request to the service (Zheng 2005). Furthermore, there is a
new approach based on the web services technology, capable of representing data to provide
context for a particular report, analysis or visualization. The GIS web services supply a mechanism
for users to discover access, visualize and evaluate geospatial data in a dynamic and update
environment, while the traditional approach typically offered whole datasets and GIS functions,
allowing users to download data and manipulate GIS operations in the user’s machine. There are
many problems regarding geospatial data accessing like acquiring GIS knowledge to handle and
update GIS data. Actually in the GIS, web services approach does not need this kind of GIS
knowledge due to the distribution of all GIS data and functions on server side instead of user side.
Besides, this approach makes sure that users always receive the most update information from their
service provider dynamically while it is static and outdated in traditional methodology.
Moreover, there is one interesting concept regarding the next-generation of the web services to
make it more intelligent and machine-based called semantic web services. In fact, both web and
semantic web have static characteristics and dynamic features too. In addition, web and web
services is human-oriented, whereas semantic web services has machine-processable characteristics.
Therefore, semantic web services has both dynamic and machine-processable characteristic. The
semantic web services will transform the web from static content which is human oriented to a
distributed computational machine-based system which work as intelligent web services (Fensel
2002)

5. Conclusions
The method presented in this paper constructing GIS web services, which is constructed by several
components, can be used to deal with mobile users who want to take some information about
facilities like restaurant or post office. This research has focused on solving some problems in the
GIS web services like accessing geospatial data and geo-related facility services on the client side
without having any GIS data and software. Accordingly, a prototype, whose architecture consists of
a windows application in the client side with GIS web services and GIS engine in server side for
mobile users, were designed and implemented. It has been found that a web services has a very
capable structure for distributed GIS implementation practically. Microsoft .NET and ERSI’s Map
Objects are appropriate structural components for such GIS web services architecture. Additionally,
this research has several versatile advantages mentioned here. One of main aspect of this study is to
expose GIS functionality and data to other computers that do not have any GIS software installed.
The .NET allows us to wrap the GIS functionality and easily expose it to any client that can hook up
to the server via the web services technique. The other benefit of this research is the capability of
the GIS web services approach to represent, access, updates, share data and service interoperability
while traditional approach typically offered whole datasets and GIS functions in the user’s machine
statistically. Moreover, this research has also shown that web services is not limited to just being
used on the web but they can be utilized by any application that has been connected to the internet.
In addition, in this architecture mobile client does not need to store geospatial data or geoprocessing
functions which are very useful for mobile device due to a more constrained computing
environment and fundamental limitations of power and memory. Overall, although this prototype
just encounters with the surface of the GIS web services, it reveals how the web services can easily
be combined with GIS applications efficiently. It is expected to utilized semantics techniques used
in this paper as a semantic geospatial web services. Semantic GIS web services add intelligent and
dynamic characteristic to system. It would be more machine-based system to manipulate geospatial
data with GIS geo-processing function dynamically.

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Authors:

PhD student, Abolghasem, Sadeghi Niaraki - Professor, Kyehyun, Kim

Dept. of Geoinformatic Engineering, Inha University, Incheon, South Korea.
a-sadeqi@inhaian.net - kyehyun@inha.ac.kr
Tel: (+82 32)860 7602, Fax: (+82 32) 863 1506