Glossary
  • BPEL (Business Process Execution Language)
    Business Process Execution Language for Web Services provides a means to formally specify business processes and interaction protocols. BPEL4WS provides a language for the formal specification of business processes and business interaction protocols. By doing so, it extends the Web Services interaction model and enables it to support business transactions. BPEL4WS defines an interoperable integration model that should facilitate the expansion of automated process integration in both the intra-corporate and the business-to-business spaces.
  • BPELPower
    BPELPower is a service chain engine. It is based on mainstream standards, including BPEL, WSDL, WSIF, Xalan, Xerces, UDDI, AXIS, SOAP, JNDI, J2EE (servlets/EJBs/JSPs), Jetspeed (Portlets) and JMX. It runs on top of popular application servers, such as Tomcat, J2EE, JBoss, Weblogic and WebSphere. It now supports BPEL-based web service chain completely. It supports:
    • "deploy it". WSDL-based web services can be deployed in BPELPower, where they are validated
    • "see it". WSDL-based web services can be displayed in BPELPower in different ways.
    • "try it". BPEL-based web services chains can be executed in BPELPower dynamically. Different invocations (e.g., HTTP POST/GET, SOAP document/rpc, etc.) are well supported.
  • CSW (Catalog Service - Web Profile)
    CSW as a part of OWS-2 is becoming the de facto standard that supports the registry and discovery of geospatial information resources. It plays a “directory” role in the open, distributed Web service environment: providers register their capabilities using metadata, and users can then query the metadata to discover interesting information.
  • ECS (EOSDIS Core System)
     NASA-sponsored, open, distributed information system to manage information from pre-EOS and EOS-era observation satellites and other Earth Science field measurement programs. It provides EOS instrument data collection, science data processing, and access to data holdings.
  • EOS (Earth Observing System)
    The Earth Observing System (EOS) is the centerpiece of NASA's Earth Science Enterprise (ESE). It is composed of a series of satellites, a science component, and a data system supporting a coordinated series of polar-orbiting and low inclination satellites for long-term global observations of the land surface, biosphere, solid Earth, atmosphere, and oceans. EOS will enable an improved understanding of the Earth as an integrated system.(http://eospso.gsfc.nasa.gov/)
  • EOSDIS (Earth Observing System Data and Information System)
    EOSDIS is a system whose purpose is to acquire, archive, manage and distribute Earth observation data to a diverse group of users. EOSDIS is NASA's contribution to the interagency Global Change Data and Information System(GCDIS).
  • GeoBrain
    GeoBrain will mobilize NASA EOS data and information through Web services and knowledge management technologies for higher-education teaching and research. The technologies, based on geo-object and geo-tree concepts, will be implemented in a standards-compliant, open, distributed, three-tier web information system. The system will make petabytes of NASA EOS data and information, especially those in the ECS data pools, as easily accessible to higher-education users, both professors and students, as their local resources. The system will allow users to dynamically and collaboratively develop interoperable, web-executable geospatial service modules and models, to run them on-line using any part of the petabytes of archived data as input, and to get back customized information products rather than raw data. This project will bring a data-enhanced geospatial learning and research environment that they have never previously experienced to the desktops of students and professors.
  • Geo-Object
    A granule of geoinformation (a dataset, a query result, or geocomputation output that describes some aspects of Earth) is a geo-object, if it consists of data itself, a set of attributes (metadata), and a set of methods (transformation and creation methods) that can operate on it. A geo-object stored at a data center is an archived geo-object. All geoinformation and knowledge products are derived from archived geo-objects. Thus, from the object point of view, all processes for geo-information/knowledge discovery are the processes of creating new geo-objects from existing ones.
  • Geo-Tree
    A user request is a user-defined geo-object, or user geo-object. The object either is an archived geo-object in a data archive or is derived by executing a geo-processing algorithm (e.g., unsupervised classification) with a set of input geo-objects. An input geo-object, if it does not exist in an archive, can be further derived by executing a geo-processing algorithm with a set of input geo-objects and so on. The steps of the decomposition process will constitute a process workflow tree, which we call a geo-tree. The construction of a geo-tree is a geospatial modeling process; and the geo-tree itself is a geospatial model that contains the knowledge of a specific application domain.
  • MPGC (Multiple Protocol Geospatial Client)
    MPGC provides an interoperable way of accessing geospatial Web services for integrating and analyzing distributed heterogeneous Earth science data, especially those from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC),. MPGC plays a “directory” role that permits the registry, discovery and access of geospatial information resources in conformance with the OGC Catalog Service - Web Profile (CSW) specification that are distributed on the Internet By implementing the latest protocols of the OGC Web Feature Service (WFS), Web Map Service (WMS) and Web Coverage Service (WCS), MPGC provides a single point of entry for access to OGC-compliant data services around the world, to request any subsets of multi-dimensional and multi-temporal geospatial data for a specific geographic region. MPGC also can access tool-like Web services, such as the Web Image Classification Service (WICS) and the Web Coordinate Transformation Service (WCTS), to produce value-added data products. Moreover, it also can 1) reformat the returning dataset in a data format specified by the user; 2) provide robust visualization and analytical tools for geospatial data; and 3) support multiple data formats: HDF, GeoTiff, GML, JPG, PNG, and GIF.
  • NEHEA (NASA EOS Higher Education Alliance)
    NEHEA is an open and free alliance for promoting and facilitating the wider use of NASA EOS data in teaching and research at higher education institutes around the world through the data-intensive Earth system learning and modeling environment provided by GeoBrain.
  • OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium)
    The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) is a non-profit, international, voluntary consensus standards organization that is leading the development of standards for geospatial and location based services. Through its member-driven consensus programs, OGC works with government, private industry, and academia to create open and extensible software application programming interfaces for geographic information systems (GIS) and other mainstream technologies.
  • SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol)
    SOAP is a simple XML-based protocol to let applications exchange information over HTTP.
  • WCS (Web Coverage Service)
    WCS supports the networked interchange of multi-dimensional and multi-temporal geospatial data as “coverages” through the “getCapabilities”, “describeCoverage” and “getCoverage” interfaces. WCS provides intact geospatial data products encoded in HDF-EOS, NITF, and GeoTIFF to meet the requirements of client-side rendering, multi-valued coverages, and input for scientific models and other clients beyond simple viewers.
  • WCTS (Web Coordinate Transformation Service)
    WCTS converts a coverage in HDF Grid format from one projection to another. Currently it supports all the projections defined in GCTP. The request parameters include the URL of the source HDF file, target projection type, resampling method, bounding box, and the 15 float-type projection parameters defined by GCTP. The result is a pointer to the URL of the target HDF file.
  • Web Service
    “A Web service 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 (specifically WSDL). Other systems interact with the Web service 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.” (http://www.w3.org/TR/ws-arch/)
  • WFS (Web Feature Service)
    Through the “getCapabilities”, “describeFeatureType” and “getFeature” interfaces, WFS supports the networked interchange of geographical vector data as a "feature" which is described by a set of properties, each of which can be thought of as a {name, type, value} tuple, and at least one of which is geometry-valued. The name and type of each feature property is determined by its type definition in its schema file. All feature data are encoded in Geographic Markup Language (GML), an extensible markup language for support and storage of geographic vector data to meet the requirements of complex spatial analysis.
  • WICS (Web Image Classification Service)
    WICS supports the classification of digital images.
  • WMS (Web Map Service)
    WMS supports the networked interchange of geospatial data as a "map", which is generally rendered dynamically from real geographical data in a spatially referenced pictorial image, such as PNG, GIF or JPEG.
  • WSDL (Web Service Description Language)
    WSDL is an XML format for describing network services as a set of endpoints operating on messages containing either document-oriented or procedure-oriented information. The operations and messages are described abstractly, and then bound to a concrete network protocol and message format to define an endpoint. Related concrete endpoints are combined into abstract endpoints (services). (http://www.w3.org/TR/wsdl)
  • XML (Extensible Markup Language)
    "Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a simple, very flexible text format derived from SGML (ISO 8879). Originally designed to meet the challenges of large-scale electronic publishing, XML is also playing an increasingly important role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the Web and elsewhere." (http://www.w3.org/XML/)
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