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A river channel storage volume calculation service based on web processing

service

Article in International Conference on Geoinformatics · June 2011

DOI: 10.1109/GeoInformatics.2011.5980995

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A River Channel Storage Volume Calculation Service
Based on Web Processing Service

Xin Li, Nengcheng Chen*, Wei Wang, Chao Wang

State Key Lab for Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing
Wuhan University
129 Luoyu Road, Wuhan Hubei, China, 430079
*Corresponding author, e-mail: [email protected]

Abstract—Web services provide a web-based solution to achieve following shortages: a few parameters can be used, and results
the interoperability of geospatial information processing– are not accurate and can’t be visualized. The river channel
meanwhile specialized users such as hydrological scientists storage volume calculation based on Digital Elevation Model
require more advanced services for analyzing and processing (DEM) is a new method. The boundary of water in river
huge volumes of data. River channel storage volume calculation
channel is very crucial for the DEM based method. However,
is one of important hydrological processes for decision of anti-
flood. This paper presents a web processing service to perform there are some difficulties in obtaining the boundary of water
river channel storage volume calculation with a new method by by in-situ measurement such as the environment conditions of
integration of the remote sensing image with in-situ river channel. In this paper, we get the boundary by the way of
measurements of water level. This prototype is built based on the extracting the waterline of river channel from remote sensing
Open Geospatial Consortium Web Processing Service (OGC image of high-accuracy, and calculate the river channel
WPS) specification. Result demonstrates the usefulness and storage volume by integration of the remote sensing image
feasibility of using distributed geoprocessing services for with in-situ measurements of water level.
hydrological models. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. We
first review OGC web processing service briefly in Section 2.
Keywords-Web services; River channel storage volume
Then, Section 3 details the process of calculating river channel
calculation; OGC WPS; Remote sensing image; In-situ
measurements
storage volume in our method. After then, some
implementation details are described in Section 4. Finally,
Section 5 provides conclusions and future work.
I. INTRODUCTION
With the developments of geography information II. OGC WEB PROCESSING SERVICE
technology, the sharing and interoperability of geo-processing
is focused on gradually. Web services provide a web-based Web Service is an open platform, through which, the web
solution to achieving the interoperability of geospatial resources can be accessed and all of the processing functions
information processing. Currently, the web services of can be used by web users [4]. Generally, a web service
geospatial information processing pay close attention to includes one or more processes and provides message schemas
common functions of GIS mostly. Meanwhile specialized users and information to connect the service users with the services
such as hydrological scientists require more advanced services providers described by standard Extensible Markup Language
for analyzing and processing huge volumes of data. River (XML) messages. As adopting the standard protocol of SOAP,
channel storage volume calculation is one of important WSDL, UDDI based on XML, it makes web services more
hydrological processes for decision of anti-flood [1], how to available widely. Although there are many advantages of web
wrap the hydrological process into web processing service used services, all of the standards of wed services are universal.
by hydrological users widely is a big challenge. The Web Therefore there will be some shortages for dealing with the
Processing Service (WPS) [2] is one of Open Geospatial problems in the special fields. In the field of geospatial
Consortium (OGC)'s interoperability standards in functional information, there are some problems for achieving the
level. The specification is designed to standardize the means interoperability of geospatial information without standardizing
for a client to request the execution of a spatial calculation the geospatial data and geospatial metadata in the protocols.
from a service. Against this problem, the Open Geospatial Consortium who is
dedicated to researching GIS resources sharing and processes
River channel storage volume calculation is very important interoperability, have proposed a series of specifications
for analyzing river channel evolution, developing river basin, including Web Map Service (WMS) [5], Web Feature Service
controlling flood and rivertraining in the hydrological field. (WFS) [6], Web Coverage Service (WCS) [7], Catalogue
There are two conventional river channel storage volume Service for the Web (CSW) [8], and Web Processing Service
calculation methods: the method by cross-sections and by (WPS) [2]. Among them, the OGC WPS is the one focusing on
balance of flow and sediment [3], but the two methods have the geoprocessing over the Web.

Supported by National Basic Research program of China under Grant

(No.2011CB707101), Natural Science Foundation of Hubei (No.
2010CDB08403) and Shenzhen R&D program. (CXB200903090023A)

978-1-61284-848-8/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE

 This specification was developed for offering any kind of C. Modeling the Water Surface
GIS processing functionality by a standardized interface using Water surface of river channel is not horizontal as water
any language and platform independent, as simple as surface of lake. The water levels of cross-sections of upper and
subtracting one spatial data from another, or as complicated as lower are different, so is the water level along the river channel.
a hydrological analysis model. The WPS specification defines We get the model of water surface by boundary of water and
ones as following: (1) how to describe the input and the output in-situ measurements of water level of upper and lower cross-
of process; (2) how to request and execute a process; (3) how sections, like building the DEM with the contour line and
to get the result of output after processing. The three functions altimetric point.
can be achieved by the following three operations:
remote sensing
GetCapabilities - This operation allows a client to request image
and receive back service metadata (or Capabilities) documents
that describe the abilities of the specific server implementation. extracting the
The operation provides the names and general descriptions of waterline

each of the processes offered by a WPS instance [2].
upper cross-section
The waterline of
DescribeProcess - This operation allows a client to request river channel
and lower cross-
section
and receive back detailed information about the processes that
can be run on the service instance, including the inputs required,
getting the
their allowable formats, and the outputs that can be produced  boundary of
[2]. water

Execute – This operation allows a client to run a specified Waterlevels

boundary of
of cross-sections
process implemented by the WPS, using provided input computing area

parameter values and returning the outputs produced [2].

getting the

III. METHOD OF RIVER CHANNEL STORAGE VOLUME

model of 
water
CALCULATION
DEM of river
The river channel storage volume calculation is important the model of water
channel
process for hydrological analysis. In this paper, we calculate
the river channel storage volume by integration of the remote
sensing data with in-situ data, instead of just utilizing the in-  Calculating
situ data, comparing to the conventional method. The process
of this method is shown in Fig. 1, and detailed explanation of
The river channel
every step is shown as follows: storage volume

A. Extracting the Waterline Figure 1. The process of the river channel storage volume calculation.
Extract the waterline of river channel from remote sensing
image of high-accuracy. Extracting the waterline is a common
process for remote sensing. First, produce a segmentation of
land and water, then extract a waterline by algorithm of edge
detection, finally, get the result of waterline by post processing.
There are some algorithms of edge detection for extracting the
waterline, not described in detail in this paper.

B. Generating the Boundary

Generate the boundary of water integrating the vector data
of upper and lower cross-sections with the waterline of river
channel. The cross-section is a section that is perpendicular to
the direction of flow in river channel, and it is an important
parameter of hydrologic computation. As is shown in Fig. 2, Figure 2. Generating the boundary of water.
the two green short lines are cross-sections of upper and lower,
and the brown line is waterline of river channel. The closed D. Calculating the Storage Volume
area of nets is the boundary of water. We get the four
intersection points of the cross-sections and waterline of river Calculate the river channel storage volume with the model
channel. If the line of cross-sections is too short to have the of water and the DEM of river channel. We make an operation
intersection point with waterline, we need lengthen the cross- by subtracting the DEM from the model of water to get a new
section line to intersect the waterline. We get the boundary of matrix, as is shown in Fig. 3. Before the operation, you need
water by the four intersection points, the two cross-section keep the gird resolutions of the two models same. For this
lines and the two waterlines. obtained new matrix, the positive values mean that the
elevation of water surface is higher than the elevation of river
channel on this place, while the negative values mean that the 1) The client sends the GetCapabilities request to the WPS
elevation of river channel is higher than the elevation of water server ˈ then gets the respond about the description of
surface on this place. We need make the positive values information of the river channel storage volume calculation
multiply the area of grid, then compute the total of every grid service.
to obtain the value of the river channel storage volume. Making
2) The client sends the Describeprocess request to the
the negative values multiply the area of grid and computing the
total, we can get the volume of islet above the water surface in WPS serverˈthen gets the respond about the description of
the river channel. inputs and output. The inputs includes five parameters: the
vector data of hydrological upper and lower cross-sections, the
        water level elevation of upper hydrological cross-section, the
water level elevation of lower hydrological cross-section, the
       
VXEWUDFW remote sensing image of the river channel, the DEM of the
        river channel, the output is the numerical value of the river
channel storage volume.
       
3) The client posts the required data to WPS server. The
WKHPRGHORIZDWHU WKH'(0RIULYHU
FKDQQHO WPS server validates the correctness of execution data. If the
format of the request is not correct, the WPS server sends
errors to the client; if no errors, it returns the result to client
   
after calling the algorithm to process the data.
    $OJRULWKP
&OLHQW :366HUYHU
0RGXOH
   

   

GetCapabilities request
Figure 3. Calculating the river channel storage volume.
GetCapabilities respond

IV. IMPLEMENTATION Desribeprocess request

As we said in the previous section, we wrap the process of

river channel storage volume calculation into web processing Desribeprocess respond

service in the prototype system. We use the 52°North WPS [9]

Execute request
framework in the implementation of our prototype system. The Post the data
52°North Web Processing Service enables the deployment of
geo-processes on the web. It features a pluggable architecture Validate the data
for processes and data encodings. The 52°North WPS supports
a set of input formats, processes and output formats. The
algorithm of the river channel storage volume calculation is Return error(if false)
Call the algorithm
realized by JAVA based on the API of Arc GIS Engine on the
version of Arc GIS 9.3. The client of WPS is also built on the
Return the result
API of Arc GIS Engine on the version of Arc GIS 9.3 by the Execute respond
language of C#. Return the result

A. Experimental Data
The river channel above the dam of Xiangjiaba in the lower
Figure 4. UML sequence diagram of WPS.
reaches of the Jinsha River, which is upper reaches of the main
stream of Changjiang River, derived from the southwestern of
Tanggula in Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, is selected as an example to C. Result and Analyses
show the potential of our method. The experimental data is Fig. 5 and Fig. 6 depict user interfaces for sending the data
very complex, including the remote sensing image of to WPS server and getting the result.
QuickBird on that area with the resolution of 0.6m, the data of
DEM produced by the topographic map of river channel In particular, Fig. 5 shows an overview of sending the data
(1:2000), the data of cross-section in the format of ESRI including DEM file, image file, cross-section file and the water
shapefile, and the numerical value of water level. level values. The nets area shown in Fig. 6 is the computed
area. The returned results include the river channel storage
B. WPS of River Channel Storage Volume Calculation volume and the islet volume. The computational accuracy is
decided by the accuracy of extracting the waterline, the
The UML sequence diagram of WPS for River Channel
accuracy of DEM and model of water surface. With the better
Storage Volume Calculation is shown in Fig. 4. Typical
extracting algorithm, the precision of extracting the waterline
working steps are illustrated and described as follows:
can be improved. The accuracy of DEM is related to the of high-accuracy and generate the boundary of water
topographic map of river channel. integrating the vector data of upper and lower cross-sections;
then we can get the model of water surface by boundary of
water and in-situ measurements of water level of upper and
lower cross-sections; finally, we process the water surface
model and the DEM of river channel to get the value of river
channel storage volume.
In addition, this paper presents a web processing service to
perform the river channel storage volume calculation through
the example of the river channel above the dam of Xiangjiaba
in the lower reaches of the Jinsha River, according to the Open
Geospatial Consortium Web Processing Service (OGC WPS)
specification. Web processing service for river channel storage
volume calculation is only instance of online hydrological
processing, and by wrapping the process of river channel
storage volume calculation with web processing service to shift
from locally-processed complex tasks to on-line, distributed
service offers, this paper demonstrates the usefulness and
feasibility of using distributed geoprocessing services for
hydrological computing.

Figure 5. The interface of sending the data to WPS server.

THE PROCESS SERVICE FOCUSES ON THE ENTIRE EXECUTION
PROCESS OF COMPUTING THE RIVER CHANNEL STORAGE
VOLUME, IN WHICH THE ALGORITHM OF EXTRACTING THE
WATERLINE NEEDS TO BE IMPROVED. BASED ON OUR STUDY,
THE WEB PROCESSING SERVICE FOR HYDROLOGICAL COMPUTING
CAN BE DONE, HOWEVER, BECAUSE HYDROLOGICAL data is
typically very large, the speed of sending data to wps server
needs to be improved. furthermore, the precision of this
method also needs to be taken into consideration in the later
research.
REFERENCES

[1] L. Chen and Z. Ming, River Dynamics, Wuhan: Wuhan University Press,
2001.
[2] P. Schut, “OpenGIS® Web Processing Service (WPS),” OGC 05-007r7,
ed: Open Geospatial Consortium, 2007, pp. 87.
[3] W. Luo, Engineering Hydrology and Hydraulic Calculation, Beijing:
China WaterPower Press, 2010.
[4] K. Gottschalk, S. Graham, and H. Kreger, “Introduction to web services
architecture,” IBM Sys. Journal, 2002, 41 (2), pp. 170-177.
[5] J. Beaujardiere, “OpenGIS® web map server implementation
Figure 6. The interface of getting the result. specification,” OGC 06-042, ed: Open Geospatial Consortium, 2006, pp.
85.
Comparing to locally-process, the process of river channel [6] P. Vretanos, “OpenGIS web feature service 2.0 interface standard,”
storage volume with WPS has the same result. However, OGC 09-025r1 and ISO/DIS 19142, ed: Open Geospatial Consortium,
accessing the geo-processes of WPS easily and quickly, it will 2010, pp. 253.
not only reduce system operating costs, but also has the [7] P. Baumann, “OGC® WCS 2.0 interface standard,” OGC 09-110r3, ed:
advantage of efficient computer load balancing. Furthermore, Open Geospatial Consortium, 2010, pp. 53.
the structure of WPS is extensible to plug other hydrological [8] D. Nebert, A. Whiteside, and P. Vretanos, “OpenGIS® catalogue
processes. services specification,” OGC 07-006r1, ed: Open Geospatial Consortium,
2007, pp. 218.
[9] 52° North WPS website from http://52north.org/communities
V. CONCLUSION /geoprocessing/wps/index.html, last accessed on 4th Apr, 2011.
This paper has proposed a method of for river channel
storage volume calculation by integration of the remote sensing
image with in-situ measurements of water level. Firstly, we
extract the waterline of river channel by remote sensing image

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