Beyond GIS with EO4V is Trails: a geospatio-temporal scientific workflow environment

Abstract

The paper presents the problems associated with current geographic information system (GIS) and the need for their integration with other specialised tooling such as statistics in R or matrix algebra of Octave. The authors take the stance that neither GIS should be adapted to include all the functionality of for example a statistics package nor should the statistics package be adapted to become a full GIS. Instead by utilising the advantages of scientific workflows many paradigms can be accommodated at once. The scientific workflows approach has other advantages to such as provenance, repeatability and collaboration. The paper presents EO4VisTrails as an example of such a scientific workflows approach to integration and discusses the benefit of the use of standards in combination with this approach taken in light of two projects that have been completed.