The UNICORE Forum e.V. is an organizational member of the Open Grid Forum (OGF).

Forschungszentrum Jülich is a member of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).

UNICORE is part of the European Middleware Initiative.

52° North WPS-G

A grid-enabled OGC Web Processing Service

The Open Geospatial Consortium's (OGC) Web Processing Service (WPS) specification defines a standardized interface to publish and perform geospatial processes over the web. Such a process can range from a simple buffer calculation to a complex process of vector analyses for generalization purposes. A typical WPS implementation supports all feature of OGC's WPS specification and the offered processes and algorithms run local inside an application-server. There is use of geo-specific third-party libraries or other mainstream Geographic Information System (GIS), but there is typically no use of grid technologies. But when computing large amounts of data and do complex calculations, the use of grid computing is a good choice for achieving high performance. At first glance, it seems that OGC's WPS and its needs of computation resources is the perfect candidate to benefit from grid technologies.

The new 52° North WPS-G - developed in the context of an ongoing research project at Institute for Geoinformatics at University of Münster - enriches the classical 52° North WPS with grid abilities. Any existing processes and algorithms can be reused and now distributed over the grid. There is full support of the UNICORE 6 grid middleware.

The 52° North Geoprocessing Community has announced the release of the Web Processing Service Version 2.0 with support for UNICORE 6. More information is available in the official press release.

Here you can find more information about our research and about our implementation:
Paper at the GI-days 2008 (pdf)
Presentation at the GI-days 2008 (pdf)
OGF-22 Presentation (pdf)
OGF-22 Report (pdf)
OGF-22 Demo Video (avi)

We are always interested in new research questions or practical user requirements. For more informations please visit http://www.52north.org or write an e-mail to Bastian Baranski.