Building Robust Geospatial Web Services for Agricultural Information Extraction and Sharing

Geospatial web service of agricultural information has a wide variety of consumers. An operational agricultural service will receive considerable requests and process a huge amount of datasets each day. To ensure the service quality, many strategies have to be taken during developing and deploying agricultural information services. This paper presents a set of methods to build robust geospatial web service for agricultural information extraction and sharing. The service is designed to serve the public and handle heavy-load requests for a long-lasting term with least maintenance. We have developed a web service to validate our approach. The service is used to serve more than 10 TB data product of agricultural drought. The performance is tested. The result shows that the service has an excellent response time and the use of system resources is stable. We have plugged the service into an operational system for global drought monitoring. The statistics and feedbacks show our approach is feasible and efficient in operational web systems.