SOAP-based web services in GIS/RDBMS environment

Implementation of Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP)-based Web services within a collection of classes GSfM (GIS Support for MCCM) is presented. GSfM facilitates the provision of various geographical and tabular input data into the MCCM (Multiscale Chemistry Climate Model). The classes have been written in object-oriented Perl. They allow to write simple Perl scripts and to perform data provision while making intensive use of the GIS and RDBMS running on remote hosts. Appropriate GIS/RDBMS functions are used to create coverages representing the modeling area, to adjust the map projection and to intersect the available land use data as well as to retrieve all required tabular data from the relational database. Due to the ability of GSfM to use two SOAP-based Web services providing access to GIS and RDBMS on foreign hosts, the Perl scripts can run on almost any platform connected to the corporate network. The article describes the setup of SOAP server and client applications based on the SOAP::Lite library. Also an application example in provision data for modeling volatile organic compounds from biogenic sources (BVOC) is presented.