DEFINING EARTH DATA BATCH PROCESSING TASKS BY MEANS OF A FLEXIBLE WORKFLOWDESCRIPTION LANGUAGE

• Published in: ISPRS annals of the photogrammetry, remote sensing and spatial information sciences Vol. III-4; pp. 59 - 66
• Main Authors: Nandra, Constantin, Gorgan, Dorian
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Gottingen Copernicus GmbH 03.06.2016; Copernicus Publications
• Subjects: Batch processing; Cloud computing; Data processing; Earth; Image processing; Language; Parallel processing; Satellite imagery; Satellites; Specification and description languages; Workflow
• ISSN: 2194-9050; 2194-9042; 2194-9050
• DOI: 10.5194/isprs-annals-III-4-59-2016

This paper aims to present some of the main features of the Workflow Description Language (WorDeL) and demonstrate their usage in defining Earth Data processing tasks. This description language is based on the flexible description of processing tasks as workflows, composed of basic processing operators. This approach allows the language to offer an intuitive way of representing processing tasks, without requiring programming expertise from its users. It also allows its users to employ and integrate existing functionality into their design, thereby reducing the design complexity and development effort of newly defined processing workflows. WorDeL supports the transparent adaptive parallelization of the processing tasks over high performance computation architectures, such as cloud-based solutions. Throughout the paper, we will exemplify this language’s use in creating flexible, reusable and easy-to-understand earth data processing descriptions, with an emphasis on satellite image processing.