ABSTRACT

As researchers globally work towards a fully digital representation of the earth and its processes – i.e. a true Digital Earth – the need grows for software and systems to link disparate computer simulation models of various parts of the earth in a reliable and highly functional way. Web services have been demonstrated as an effective way to share and reuse models as they enable communication and interoperation among applications via the Internet. However, even using well-designed software tools, it remains a daunting process to publish heterogeneous environmental models as web services and provide long-term maintenance in response to changing computational environments. We present an approach that enables environmental models to be published as long-term functional web services on the same platform regardless of execution mode, programming language, and computational environment conflicts. The approach adopts the OpenGMS Wrapper System (OGMS-WS) for service publishing and Docker containers for model isolation. A streamflow prediction service is developed using this approach and is applied to analyze historical streamflow trends in Bangladesh. We demonstrate that this approach can lower the barrier to deploying heterogeneous environmental models as long-term functional web services, contributing to the development of a Digital Earth.

摘要

随着全球研究人员努力实现地球及其过程的全数字表示——即真正的数字地球——越来越需要软件和系统以可靠且功能强大的方式连接地球各个部分的不同计算机模拟模型。Web 服务已被证明是一种共享和重用模型的有效方式，因为它们通过 Internet 实现了应用程序之间的通信和互操作。然而，即使使用设计良好的软件工具，将异构环境模型发布为 Web 服务并提供长期维护以响应不断变化的计算环境仍然是一个艰巨的过程。我们提出了一种方法，无论执行模式、编程语言和计算环境冲突如何，都可以将环境模型作为长期功能性 Web 服务发布在同一平台上。该方法采用 OpenGMS Wrapper System (OGMS-WS) 进行服务发布，采用 Docker 容器进行模型隔离。使用这种方法开发了流量预测服务，并应用于分析孟加拉国的历史流量趋势。我们证明这种方法可以降低将异构环境模型部署为长期功能 Web 服务的障碍，从而有助于数字地球的发展。