Development of a WPS process chaining tool and application in a disaster management use case for urban areas

Today, Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) are primarily used to share and access distributed spatial data. However, the usefulness of SDIs can be improved by developing Web Services that are also capable of processing the shared data in order to tailor the results to the needs of the user. In this context the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has recently approved the Web Processing Service (WPS) 1.0.0 as an OpenGIS standard (Schut 2007). This standard defines a generic Web Service interface to data processing functionality.