DEVELOPMENT OF A SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE BASED GEOGRAPHIC 
INFORMATION SYSTEM IN EARTH SCIENCES 
G. Toz*, A. Dogru” * 
* ITU, Civil Engineering Faculty, 34469 Maslak Istanbul, Turkey - tozg@itu.edu.tr 
? Bogazici University, Kandilli Observatory and Earthquake Research Institute, Geodesy Department, 34680 Cengelkoy 
Istanbul, Turkey - asli.dogru@boun.edu.tr 
KEY WORDS: Earth crust deformation, Geodesy, Geographic information system, Service-oriented architecture 
ABSTRACT: 
The studies of recent crustal movements are based on analyses of repeated geodetic measurements, and their combination with 
results of geophysical and geological investigations. It is obvious that a single data producer can not produce useful datasets and 
information without integrating data from others because one scientist's results become another's data. So, the problem to be solved 
naturally has an interdisciplinary character. However, Earth scientists traditionally work on one aspect of the problem and they have 
a tradition of sharing of data but they are willing to share it if asked. Because of this, the resources are being wasted in duplicative 
efforts. However, the goal is for data to evolve it into information, and then into knowledge as quickly and effectively as possible. In 
order to do this, calculations and analysis need to bring to the desktops of researchers, decision-makers, and educators. The aim of 
this study is to develop a service-oriented architecture (SOA) based Geographic Information System (GIS) that enables linking and 
sharing multidisciplinary Earth science data, tools, and software and to provide a wide range of users access to the system and in this 
way to build an easy-to-use interactive access to data and analysis environment to study earthquakes in Turkey. 
1. INTRODUCTION 
1.1 Geosciences and Information Technology 
Earth sciences (a.k.a. Geosciences), is a term for the sciences 
related to the Earth. While data and compute-intensive nature of 
this discipline makes reaching results difficult, there are still 
duplicative efforts on data collection, conversion, reformatting 
and tool development which cause waste of labour and time. 
Therefore, building mechanisms which are capable to share 
these data and tools is the key for the next generation of Earth 
science research. These platforms include databases, networks, 
visualization, analytical tools, computational resources, and so 
on. There are a lot of efforts such as data collection from field 
observations and sensors, database creation, software 
development, data integration, and data management. 
Moreover, each of them has its own various problems. The need 
is to provide access to all of existing resources and support 
interoperability among them by using information technologies. 
Today, there are an increasing number of applications using 
spatial data on the Web benefiting from such technologies. 
Some of them are Earth sciences applications including GIS and 
web-mapping implementations from major institutions in the 
world such as US Geological Survey, Geosciences Network, 
and the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology, and 
European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre. They have 
capabilities and limitations, too. In general, applications include 
interactive maps showing location of the earthquakes, seismicity 
of the region, seismic hazard and earthquake density, GPS sites, 
their displacement history and also some geophysical data. Most 
of these applications are for earthquake monitoring. 
Turkey is an earthquake country. 96 percent of the land 
containing 66 percent of the active faults is affected by 
earthquake hazards and 98 percent of the population lives in 
these regions. North Anatolian Fault Zone of Turkey is a natural 
* Corresponding author 
laboratory for Earth scientists where various tectonic landforms 
exist. Particularly on the western part of it, a lot of geodetic 
projects have performed for monitoring crustal movements over 
three decades. There are an increasing number of data inferred 
from these tectonic studies. In order to avoid repeated efforts 
and to analyze these data rapidly, use of information technology 
is necessary. GIS is one of the information technology tools to 
accomplish such comprehensive studies and solving complex 
problems in Earth sciences. Clearly, GIS provides a convenient 
platform for data collection, organization, and research with 
multidisciplinary data sets. As more groups adopt GIS 
applications, the earth sciences community will be in a position 
to prepare a unified global database for more efficient, 
productive, and rewarding research [1]. 
The other one can be the implementation of Service Oriented 
Architecture (SOA) in the Web environments (Web services) 
for Earth science applications that increases the speed of the 
scientific discovery process. A Web service can be defined that 
a programmable application which is accessible using standard 
Internet protocols. Web services can be any piece of code that is 
available over the Internet and they can be written in any 
language. Reuse of existing tools, lower cost of maintenance 
and reduced impact of change are the most important benefits of 
Web services. The application of this study is built in a service- 
oriented architecture for reusability and interoperability of its 
components. 
1.2 System Overview 
The scope of the study covers obtaining and processing Earth 
science data and tools, and integrating in a GIS environment 
using information technologies, and then transmitting to the 
users via the Internet. Figure 1 displays the architecture of the 
system design. 
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