A recent discussion provoked by this SOA Post Mortem article got me thinking about Service-Oriented Architectures and Web Services in the context of our geospatial industry. The general argument in that article is Web services is just the latest buzzword to justify a big round of IT funding if you don’t do the business transformation work to actually redesign your enterprise around the idea of providing information services.

Sounds like it makes sense, but what does that actually mean? To put it in the context of OGC Web services, I’d phrase it as, WMS, WFS, WCS, etc. represent the SOA concept that needs to die. Just because you put a Web Feature Service API on your roads data doesn’t mean you’ve service-enabled anything. You may have taken the first required step towards a service, but the business transformation work isn’t done.

However, let’s say you figure out that what your end users actually need is a service that reports the pavement quality and last maintenance date of all roads in a certain jurisdiction for long-term strategic planning on infrastructure upkeep. Then you build that “service” using your WFS and its ability to handle sophisticated queries. Now you have what I’d call a real service providing real identifiable business value.

So the OGC suite of data delivering Web services is more of a meta-service architecture, or spatial data infrastructure, upon which real value-oriented services can be built. But don’t think you’ve created much value in your organization by simply standing up out-of-the-box OGC services without going the next step and figuring out what applications your data users actually need.