Towards an ESB-Based Enterprise Integration Platform for Geospatial Web Services

Geographic Information Systems {GIS) have emerged to store, handle, analyze, and present geographic data to experts and casual users alike. As the number and scope of geo-enabled applications have increased considerably in recent years, new software solutions, like Internet Map Servers ({IMS)}, have been incorporated into the enterprise software portfolio, giving birth to the “Enterprise GIS”. Although these systems are based on standards for distributed geospatial processing and data exchange, through the use of Geospatial Web Services, they have to be complemented with other mechanisms to integrate them with business data and functionalities provided by traditional enterprise systems. In turn, an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is a standards-based integration platform, which provides mediation capabilities to address mismatches among applications regarding communication protocols and message formats, among others. This paper proposes an ESB-based reference platform which, leveraging its mediation capabilities, provides reusable geo-oriented integration mechanisms to deal with common challenges of integrating traditional enterprise systems with Geospatial Web Services.