Using ISO 19115 Metadata and WebServices to Facilitate Data Access, Visualization and Processing

Abstract

It is nowadays commonly accepted that metadata and metadata systems are useful and necessary for organizational and inter-organizational networking, information flow and retrieval. ISO 19115 and its XML-representation ISO 19139 have become de facto standard for metadata descriptions in the environmental community. Many initiatives are formed to establish a wide network of metadata repositories. They collect metadata about geographic and nongeographic information or create broker architectures and systems to allow retrieval through distributed repositories. We want go one step further and describe how we use Metadata to access, to process and to visualize data. The means to achieve this are Web services. In this paper we describe the general idea of our service oriented architecture for environmental information handling and show the advantages and possibilities of our comprehensive approach to wrap and bridge isolated applications through services. Special focus is put on the basic principles of the architecture and the workflow to support the users. To exemplify our approach and to show that environmental information handling goes beyond OGC-conformance, we focus on integrated coastal zone management (ICZM). The scenarios used throughout this paper reflect the new challenges addressed in the NOKIS++ project.