A Web Service Approach to Geographical Data Distribution Among Public Administrations

In this paper a service-oriented architecture (SOA) is proposed to support the interaction with legacy Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and the implementation of value added data sharing services. In particular, we base our proposed architecture both on the standardization effort carried out by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and on current state-of-the-art Web Service middleware infrastructure. We have evaluated the proposed architecture in the context of GIS application integration in a departmental back-office scenario. The advantages of a service-oriented architecture are twofold: on one hand, it is possible to integrate several GIS application and data sources simply by wrapping their (legacy) services with appropriate interface and registering them in Web Service directories; on the other hand, this new service paradigm can be used to support the creation of completely new cartographic data sharing services.