HR: 17:06h
AN: IN44A-06    [Abstracts]
TI: CHRONOS's Examples of Application of Standards to REST Services
AU: * Cervato, C
EM: cinzia@iastate.edu
AF: Iowa State University, 253 Science I, Ames, IA 50011, United States
AU: Fils, D
EM: fils@iastate.edu
AF: Iowa State University, 253 Science I, Ames, IA 50011, United States
AU: Diver, P
EM: divdat@aol.com
AF: DivDat Consulting, 1392 Madison 6200, Wesley, AR 72773, United States
AB: We will present the approach that CHRONOS is using to exchange data with third party web sites and applications based on Representational State Transfer (REST) services. REST allows for the simple creation of services by associating documents with URL's in a manner similar to traditional web sites, where user- generated requests return data usually encoded in HTML. We will show the use of the Web Application Description Language (WADL) to address issues of REST service description. Then, by combining these REST services with XML documents and Microformats, we provide a standards-based approach to the delivery of services and data. These REST-style services facilitate external use thanks to the use of traditional web-style request/response structure. We will present an example of an application that delivers age models from ODP's Janus database to both web-based and stand-alone client applications (e.g., GeoMapApp). The network-accessible CHRONOS infrastructure is designed around a Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA), in which all of the functionality is exposed as discrete services. These services can be combined to create new services and consumed both internally, by tools in the toolkit and portal interfaces, and externally by other groups for their own efforts and tasks. This service-based approach has reduced the time it takes the CHRONOS IT team to turn a feature request from the community into a production-caliber tool or portal interface. A common theme throughout the CHRONOS architecture is the use of XML for describing services, data, and metadata. XML is a simple, standard text format that enjoys widespread adoption and support across all platforms, making it a natural choice in an open architecture. CHRONOS employs several community-developed and supported XML schemas for representing time scale, GIS, and other data. The presentation will emphasize the added importance of the utilization of XML because of the free-form nature of REST services, and the combination with Microformats, which include extractable concepts into the body of the returned document.
UR: http://www.chronos.org
DE: 0430 Computational methods and data processing
DE: 0459 Macro- and micropaleontology (3030, 4944)
DE: 3036 Ocean drilling
SC: Earth and Space Science Informatics [IN]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting