GeoBrain Online Analysis System: An SOA-Based Geospatial Web Portal

Abstract

The geospatial Web portal is the gateway to combining news, information, data, and applications from the geosciences community. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Software as a Service, Rich Internet Application, and other emerging Web standards and technologies have revolutionized the implementation of Web portals. The GeoBrain project is developing a comprehensive Web service-oriented geospatial portal, the GeoBrain Online Analysis System (GeOnAS). This data-rich and service-centric geospatial portal provides easy, fast, and federated Web access to geospatial data, information, and services compliant with Open Geospatial Consortium standards from multiple sources. It offers standards-based geospatial data discovery, retrieval, visualization and analysis to facilitate geosciences research and education around the world, and to help decision-makers and analysts work more efficiently and effectively within an SOA runtime environment. Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax) also brings more responsive, interactive, and dynamic features to this Web portal and creates a better Web experience to its end users in the confines of a modern browser.