Enhanced satellite positioning as a web service with goGPS open source software

Providing enhanced satellite positioning as a web service can be an effective way to enable low-level GPS receivers to perform surveys with a good accuracy and to reduce hardware cost, by removing computation capability and embedded proprietary software. goGPS is an open source application for achieving sub-meter accuracy with low-cost GPS receivers by exploiting real-time kinematic positioning, Kalman filtering, aid from a digital terrain model, and in general by integrating GPS data with other sources of information. Since goGPS directly processes raw GPS observations, it provides a means to substitute blackbox processing components (e.g., GPS chipsets) with open source positioning software. goGPS can work either in realtime or post-processing, by acquiring raw GPS data in input and providing positioning (i.e., coordinates) in output. Though originally developed in MATLAB, goGPS was recently ported to Java in order to have the possibility to provide it as a web service, thus allowing a wider user base to develop and use it. Since real-time GPS positioning heavily relies on fast matrix computation, a careful selection of Java matrix libraries was carried out in order to obtain optimal performances. An Open Geospatial Consortium standard Web Processing Service (WPS) implementation of goGPS by means of ZOO WPS framework was developed and tested in order to let lightweight clients just acquire raw GPS data, send them to a server for processing, and receive back the accurate positioning.