Interoperable processing of digital elevation models in grid infrastructures

Based on the service specifications of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) support the visualization, access to vector and raster data or managing and search for spatial data. A standard for distributed spatial data processing was missing for a long time. This issue was addressed by the development of the OpenGIS Web Processing Service (WPS) specification. However, to process and analyze massive Digital Elevation Models (DEM) computing power and disk memory are scarce commodities. Here we show that Grid Computing in combination with OGC Web Services (OWS) is well suited to accomplish high processing performance and storage capacity for large-scale processing tasks of the geo community. To process these massive amounts of geo-data we develop terrain processing services which are made available as grid services. Our results will be demonstrating how to bridge the gap between the grid world and the OGC world for more sophisticated terrain processing.