What is Service Chain

In the context of Geographic Information System’s evolution from monolithic systems to personal desktop GIS and then to collections of remote Internet services, we discuss the combination or chaining of distributed geospatial web services. The adoption of web services technology provides remote access to a diverse and wide array of geospatial datasets and allows developers to create web applications (web browser-based or GIS client-based), hiding the underlying server functionalities from their public interfaces. A major challenge in working with these remote services, as opposed to a single desktop application, is to properly integrate ad hoc services to build a coherent service chain; this is especially tricky in real-time scenarios where web applications need to be built on-the-fly. This chapter discusses strategies for geospatial web service chaining and poses some challenging issues, many related to semantics, to be resolved for geospatial web service chaining to become a commonplace activity.