Open Standards for Integrating Datacube Backend, Catalog, and Visualization Tools: A Case Study

Today, service-oriented architectures dominate the field over monolithic systems. Manifold building blocks are available, with a likewise wide range of application programming interfaces (APIs). Standards can help here in that they give guidance for implementers and ease adaptation to further tools coming with the same interface, thereby widening opportunities for composing services. Some argue that open source is the key because the source code can be inspected anytime; the author's view, conversely, is that open standards are key to interoperability. This case study connects the THREDDS data catalog and metadata management server, the ncWMS Web mapping extension of the OGC Web Map Service (WMS), and the rasdaman array database management system, thereby providing an integrated approach to handle Big Geo Data. In particular, the resulting system combines efficient raster query processing of rasdaman with flexible metadata search in THREDDS and intuitive visualization through ncWMS.