Automatic workflow composition in the geospatial domain: an application on sea-level rise impacts analysis

The geospatial domain has recently seen a trend towards migrating data analysis software processes from predefined static systems to purpose-specific compositions of existing services, often in the form of workflows. However, the technicalities involved in a correct and adequate workflow design and service composition frequently impose great challenges on researchers working in the geospatial application domain, especially if they are not IT experts or trained programmers. The PROPHETS plugin of the jABC workflow modeling framework facilitates synthesis-based (semi-) automatic composition of services into workflows and can thus help to reduce the amount of technical knowledge that is required for this task. In this paper, we show how it can be applied for the design of workflows for analyzing the impacts of sea-level rise. We also address the preceding domain modeling, which comprises the design of adequate services and the provisioning of semantic meta-information about the services in terms of service interface descriptions, as well as ontology models for the classification of the types and services in the domain.