GIS meets e-Business: Web Pricing & Ordering Service (WPOS)
Roland M. Wagner, Rüdiger Gartmann
Fraunhofer Institute for Software and System Engineering (ISST) Berlin/Dortmund
Mollstraße 1, 10178 Berlin, Germany
Joseph-von-Fraunhofer-Straße 20, 44227 Dortmund, Germany
roland.wagner@isst.fhg.de
gartmann@do.isst.fhg.de
Abstract
With the great success of introducing the OGC Web Map Server and the OGC
interoperability activities, the GIS world moves towards easy and quick availability with
Web Services. Web Services will merge and manipulate vector and bitmap data. Much data
sources are available for free. However, data of high value will not be accessible in the
WWW without any payment. E-Business Services are needed for an automated processing.
The pricing of geodata and location-based services is still complex. Selling geodata means
in the majority of cases selling license rights, which leads to complicated price models, as it
is also known from other branches. Both, ISO and OGC, do not define a price model on a
level of detail, which is sufficient for e-Business applications. An approach to handle e-
Business information in a distributed environment is the new Web Pricing & Ordering
Service (WPOS). The ability to configure geo products by user requires a more complex
pricing mechanism. On the other hand, the lack of common accepted pricing rules in the
branch requires a flexible pricing mechanism to cover many different pricing methods. The
lowest common denominator for marketing in every company is the mathematical pricing
formula. The Web Pricing & Ordering Service interface to price models is defined by an
OGC Basic Service Model-like set of Internet services. Therefore, the handling of pricing
information in a distributed environment is covered in detail in our paper.
Introduction
The business situation of the newly developing market for geodata is still divergent. Every data supplier has
developed his own pricing formula because of a lack of commonly accepted rules. The idea of a portal is to
connect as many as possible data suppliers and to transfer necessary data for business transactions not
depending of their concrete product and price models. Flexible product definition, pricing and licensing is a
core module of an e-commerce platform. New transaction mechanisms are required.
Currently, Fraunhofer Institute for Software and System Engineering (ISST), Berlin/Dortmund, Germany,
is implementing these new developments within the project GeoMarkt.NRW, a part of “Geographic Data
Infrastructure”-project (GDI NRW). In 1999 the German state North-Rhine Westphalia launched this
project in order to push forward the GeoInformation market in North-Rhine Westphalia by providing an
open network for GeoInformation and geodata based services (Brox, Kuhn, Bishr 2000; Brüggemann
2000).
Portal Architecture in a Distributed Environment
Distributed Sources
GeoInformation is describing the world. The information is collected and stored in different ways, because
everybody has a different view. The data description varies from sector to sector and from institution to
institution. It is often, that a different sector uses a quite different terminology, because of its viewpoint.
There are many disadvantages with the fact of distributed data sources. But an important advantage is the
possibility to maintain data by its owner. The world is changing quickly and therefore maintenance of
geodata is essential for its value. Copyrights and value are as well an important factor. Therefore, there is a
need to support a communication in a distributed environment. This interoperability is only possible, if
standards are used to exchange data.
Merging geo-referenced Information
GeoInformation can be often visualized as maps. With the new OGC Web Map Server specification (Jeff
de La Beaujardière, 2001), different layers from different sources can be merged. A typical example is the
visualization of weather and road information. Another example would be marketing GeoInformation and
the position of shops.
