BPELPower—A BPEL execution engine for geospatial web services

• Published in: Computers & geosciences 2012-10, Vol.47, p.87-101
• Main Authors: Yu, Genong (Eugene), Zhao, Peisheng, Di, Liping, Chen, Aijun, Deng, Meixia, Bai, Yuqi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: BPEL; Geospatial workflow; Web service; Workflow control pattern; Workflow data pattern
• ISSN: 0098-3004; 1873-7803
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cageo.2011.11.029

The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) has become a popular choice for orchestrating and executing workflows in the Web environment. As one special kind of scientific workflow, geospatial Web processing workflows are data-intensive, deal with complex structures in data and geographic features, and execute automatically with limited human intervention. To enable the proper execution and coordination of geospatial workflows, a specially enhanced BPEL execution engine is required. BPELPower was designed, developed, and implemented as a generic BPEL execution engine with enhancements for executing geospatial workflows. The enhancements are especially in its capabilities in handling Geography Markup Language (GML) and standard geospatial Web services, such as the Web Processing Service (WPS) and the Web Feature Service (WFS). BPELPower has been used in several demonstrations over the decade. Two scenarios were discussed in detail to demonstrate the capabilities of BPELPower. That study showed a standard-compliant, Web-based approach for properly supporting geospatial processing, with the only enhancement at the implementation level. Pattern-based evaluation and performance improvement of the engine are discussed: BPELPower directly supports 22 workflow control patterns and 17 workflow data patterns. In the future, the engine will be enhanced with high performance parallel processing and broad Web paradigms.