Enhancing agricultural geospatial data dissemination and applications using geospatial web services

There are many important publicly available agricultural geospatial data products for the agriculture-related research, applications, and educational outreach programs. The traditional data distribution method cannot fully meet users' on-demand geospatial data needs. This paper presents interoperable, standard-compliant Web services developed for geospatial data access, query, retrieval, statistics, mapping, and comparison. Those standard geospatial web services can be integrated in scientific workflows to accomplish specific tasks or consumed over the Web to create value-added new geospatial application by users. In addition, this paper demonstrates, via real world use cases, applications of those services and potential impacts on facilitating geospatial Cropland Data Layer (CDL) retrieval, analysis, visualization, dissemination and integration in agricultural industry, government, research, and educational communities. This paper also shows that the geospatial Web service approach helps improve the reusability, interoperability, dissemination, and utilization of agricultural geospatial data. It allows for integrating multiple online applications and different geospatial data sources, and enables automated retrieving and delivery of agricultural geospatial information for decision-making support.