June 29, 2015 -- The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) membership has approved the OGC Web Processing Service (WPS) Version 2 Interface Standard.

The OGC Web Processing Service (WPS) Version 2 Interface Standard provides rules for standardizing how inputs and outputs (requests and responses) for geospatial processing services, such as polygon overlay, can be structured in a standard way. WPS also defines how a client can request the execution of a process, and how the output from the process is handled. By implementing this standard, any geospatial processing service, regardless of the source, can be “wrapped” with a standard interface and integrated into existing workflows. WPS supports both immediate processing for computational tasks that take little time and asynchronous processing for more complex and time consuming tasks. Moreover, the WPS standard defines a general process model that is designed to provide an interoperable description of processing functions. It is intended to support process cataloguing and discovery in a distributed environment.

This standard is a continuation of WPS 1.0. It incorporates a range of change requests that have been submitted since the release of WPS 1.0 and further conforms to the OGC standard for modular specifications (OGC 08-131r3). In contrast to Version 1.0, WPS 2.0 provides a core conceptual model that may be used to specify a WPS in different architectures such as REST or SOAP.

The WPS process model has been encapsulated into separate requirements and conformance classes so it may be used independently from WPS servers in process catalogs and metadata records. The expressive power of process descriptions has been enhanced by permitting structured (or nested) inputs and outputs. The concept of process profiles has been clarified and extended to support process descriptions at different levels of abstraction.

Conversely, the process model itself has been largely decoupled from the WPS protocol, allowing the use of other domain-specific descriptions of processes, e.g. those defined in OGC SensorML, and to execute them on a WPS server.  WPS 2.0 also provides a Basic WPS conformance class that comprises the synchronous and asynchronous execution protocol.

The OGC Web Processing Service 2.0 Interface Standard [OGC 14-065] document package can be downloaded from http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/wps.

The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 500 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OGC standards support interoperable solutions that "geo-enable" the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/.

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