RPRA: A novel approach to mastering geospatial web service testing complexity

Geospatial data, such as 2-D satellite images, 3-D image time-series, or 4-D climate/ocean data, provide important information for Earth Science System research. Standardized communication protocols, such as those established by Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), help to achieve interoperability between clients and servers. To achieve real interoperability, conformance testing is required to test interface conformance of tools provided by, e.g., the geospatial industry. While such testing poses challenges in itself, it is also of impact how much the specification itself supports testing of implementations. A well-defined service request model is of critical importance to a comprehensive and finite test generation. In this paper, we propose a Request Parameter Relationship Analysis (RPRA) approach on the specification-based service request models. These models are requirement consistent which means the requests derived meet all specified pre-conditions for both service operations and the data provided. The aim of our work is to study how many service requests are needed to test a standardized implementation. This work is part of the development of the new test suite for the WCS 2.0 standard. In this way, an improved interoperability of geospatial coverage web services under evolving implementations is expected in future.