's Blog

Generating just-in time data products for first responders require the chaining of many web services using workflows.

Our interesting challenge is multi-fold. First responders from various organizations will need access to data provided by other organizations in case of emergencies. Single sign-on is a must. Trusted relationships between organizations is critical to grant access of sensitive data or assets to remote users in a seamless manner.

Access profiles may need to be exchanged at login to determine the access rights of those incoming users.

With the OGC, we are working on RESTful APIs for SensorWeb Enabled Data Nodes. Fairly sophisticated workflows will access remote web services to task satellites, process the data and deliver custom products to the end-users. This needs to be done securely on behalf of the end-users that may grant temporary or permanent access to costly resources to those workflows.

As part of OWS-5, we will be demonstrating that capability fairly shortly. This will require the tight integration of Identity standards such as OpenID 2.0 and the emerging OAuth.

This is part of our effort to provide a simpler but secure resource oriented architecture (ROA) that will scale up to support a broader community in a federated environment.