International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Volume XXXIX-B4, 2012 
XXII ISPRS Congress, 25 August — 01 September 2012, Melbourne, Australia 
The open source JBoss jBPM engine was selected as the work 
flow engine for the NWG architecture. jBPM is an extensible and 
flexible process engine that can run as a standalone server or 
embedded in any Java application. JBoss jBPM delivers the 
capability of developing new automated business processes and 
work flows with industry-standard orchestration using Business 
Process Model and Notation (BPMN V2.0). BPMN is a standard 
specification created by the Object Management Group (OMG) 
that defines a standard language to model business process 
including execution semantics that can be understood by both 
business analysts and technical people. The usage of jBPM has 
been instrumental in modelling our work flow from the start to 
finish including human steps and providing e-mail alerts for the 
different wait state in-between process. 
Job Scheduling 
There are a lot of job schedulers out there that have different 
capabilities. We selected Quartz the enterprise Job scheduler to be 
our scheduler of choice since it provides avery extensive sets of 
functionality and is a mature platform to build our applications on. 
Having a robust job scheduler integrated in the architecture has 
allowed us to run multiple jobs from harvesting daily flight logs to 
sending nightly what remains to fly reports efficiently in very 
customizable schedule. 
Monitoring Services 
The deployment stack consists of tools that provide a reliable 
means of detecting and monitoring faults in the production 
servers. Even though most production servers have redundancy, 
automating the response and alerting the operation group 
whenever there are interruptions in service and/or a resource 
reaches a critical state is a very important part of providing a 
reliable system. For these reasons we have developed monitoring 
tools based on open source that are able to diagnose problems and 
provide a self-healing environment if possible. For example, some 
of the capabilities of the alert and monitoring system are watch 
dogs for WMS servers using the GetCapabilities and GetMap 
responses. 
High Performance Computing 
The Condor® Project is our selected high performance computing 
platform to perform computationally intensive jobs on a grid of 
dedicated clusters. A module to interact with the Condor cluster 
for submission and monitoring of jobs within the application 
server was developed. This module allows us to increase the 
turnaround time of the business process and maximize the usage 
of the HPC cluster resource since the system is now able to submit 
jobs to the cluster as soon as the precondition for that step in the 
work flow engine are finished by either humans operators or 
another application. 
Web Services 
Standards enable systems to be built that easily discover and 
seamlessly combine spatial information from different sources and 
share it among many users and applications (Beshah et al., 2008). 
At NWG we have built an Enterprise Spatial Platform that is 
designed to securely manage and deliver geospatial data to users 
operating on rich client desktop systems and web clients. We 
242 
expose the different processed geospatial data and their status 
throughout the workflow using a number of OGC web services, 
Currently the system supports the OGC Web Mapping Service 
(WMS), Web Feature Service (WFS) and Web Coverage 
Service(WCS). 
In addition, other core open source technologies like PostGIS, 
Hibernate, OpenLayers, GWT, GeoTools and others were 
integrated at different layers of the architecture. The selection and 
integration of these different frameworks and libraries to create a 
single coherent geospatial platform that is firmly based on both 
enterprise and high performance computing was the biggest 
challenge we faced. 
REAL WORLD USAGE 
NWG deployed the first version of the enterprise mapping system, 
coined Production Tracker, in 2010 and has since ingested every 
flight into the system as illustrated in Figure 3. 
Rates = Hort West Geamsates Productions Tracher, versioe 5.E0- SHAPSHOT.2821 Yéekoee: demam SE 
  
  
^ Recontne Sessiens 
wo Rte Rls 
^ Tus Status 
^c Og Acto Rapt 
^ cR 
^ WMatrüments 
^ Tuanquiaton 
  
«asie tation 
^ pee 
^ Help 
Figure 3: Overview of acquisition blocks in Production Tracker 
Since the initial deployment the Production Tracker has been 
constantly updated and as of April 2012 the latest version exposes 
functionality that fulfils the requirements from Planning through 
Ingest and initial QC. 
Once the flight crew has recorded imagery an email with an 
attached flight execution export that contains planned and 
recorded flight lines is sent to the office where by it is 
automatically ingested into the Production Tracker. The office can 
immediately check line coverage and consistency without having 
access to the full dataset. An example is given in Figures 4 & 5. 
  
  
Once 
copie 
an XI 
to the