Authors: Lubia Vinhas and Karine Ferreira

Abstract: Spatio-temporal data is used to represent dynamic spatial phenomena. Some examples are physical processes like temperature and volcano eruption, moving objects like animal and iceberg movement tracking and as well as evolving objects like oil spill evolution on the ocean. This spatio-temporal data is generated by different technologies, such as fixed and mobile geosensors, GPS and Earth observation satellites or radio-frequency identification (RFID) and can are stored as distributed data sources. In order to analyze this kind of data specific operations are necessary, for instance, extraction of trajectories, calculation of the variation of distance between two moving objects over time and extraction of time series of a specific location or area.
In this context, a service oriented architecture is a good option to create a framework to handle the distributed spatio-temporal data sources. The leading organization devote to propose specifications for interoperable geo service standards is the Open GeoSpatial Consortium (OGC). Currently, the OGC has defined dozens of abstract and implementation specifications. Several of them deal with spatio-temporal data, but is there something missing? With this motivation, this work aims to evaluate if and how existing web service specifications, such as Sensor Observation Service (SOS), Web Feature Service (WFS), Web Coverage Service (WCS), Web Processing Service (WPS), Open Location Service (OpenLS) and Sensor Planning Service (SPS), deal with spatio-temporal information. The main goal is to assess them by considering the aspects the supported spatio-temporal data and operations, usability and compliance of existing implementations.