Spatial web service evaluator for supporting spatial web portal

Web services are key enabling technology for information interoperability and serve as the foundation for spatial Web portal. However, the quality of web services is different and becomes one of the challenges for deploying a spatial web portal. We conducted initial research and developed a spatial web service evaluator to assess the qualities of web services taken Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) web services as an example. A two-level evaluation mechanism is proposed: 1) analyzing the validity of OGC web services by examining the corresponding service specifications, 2) comparing the performances of different services of the same type through calculating the time spent on responding, parsing, and transmitting the services. By focusing on existing web services, our evaluator has the following features: 1) Supporting the most frequently used services such as WMS, WFS and WCS and catalog service such as CSW; 2) Periodically checking performances and records into the database; 3) Showing all services and their overall performances graphically; 4) Deploying as a component which can be integrated into spatial web portal. The spatial web service evaluator suggests a new way to assess and visualize service quality.