Design and Evaluate the OGC Web Services Architecture of a Geohazard analysis tool

Open standards like Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards can be used to improve interoperability and re-usability among geospatial tools, datasets and services across the web. Today more than six thousands commercial and non commercial implementations of the OGC Web Services (OWS) are available, and more and more Geographical Information Systems (GIS) web applications, platforms and datasets are being published from organizations in the global geospatial community. This thesis explores if the GIS standards, their implementations, and the organizations themselves are mature enough to support quality decision making in sectors like the risk management, by developing GIS web applications with up-to-date spatial datasets and complex geo-processes. Motivation for this research has been the Risk Indicators for Infrastructure in Data scarce Environments (RI2DE) GIS web tool of Deltares institution, a tool that performs GIS analysis based on datasets with global coverage, in order to detect areas around road infrastructures that are susceptible against climate related geohazards, and its need to provide quality risk maps and more friendly to the user Graphical User Interface (GUI) through status reporting messages and control of the processes. The tool is developed with open source technology components, OWS and standard data formats (such us Geographic JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) (GeoJSON), JSON and eXtensible Markup Language (XML). Having as case study the RI2DE tool, within this research the OGC Web Processing Service (WPS) 2.0.2 standard that is responsible for publishing geoprocesses as web services and its free and open source PyWPS 4.0.0 implementation has been evaluated according to the new operations for job monitoring and job control that the standard offers, in order to assess if it is feasible to have status report messages and control of the processes. Moreover it has be assessed how easy is to find and access up-to-date datasets, services and tools from distributed Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI)s that implement the Catalogue Service for the Web (CSW) standard, and how flexible are the WPS to accept different inputs. From an early stage of this research it has been clear that the status reporting and the control of the process would have been difficult to be implemented, since the PyWPS implementation of the WPS 2.0.2 is still undergoing until the delivery of this thesis. While the standard has been published since 2015, the only available full implementation of it is from the ZOO-Project, which arise question regarding the complexity of the standard specification and the currently state-of-the-art technology. The greatest achievement of this thesis has been the integration of the distributed searching for services at different CSW catalogues, at the RI2DE tool web browser. While the implementation was achieved, many question were arise concerning the sharing of the produced geospatial information from organizations and countries.Geomatic