ZOO is an on-going OWS (OGC Web Services) open source platform project. It provides a WPS compliant developer-friendly framework to create and chain OGC compliant webservices. The ZOO OWS platform is made of three parts:

• ZOO Kernel : A powerful and extensible server-side C Kernel which makes it possible creating, managing and chaining geoprocessing operations.
• ZOO Web Client: A Javascript webmapping API build on top of OpenLayers designed to communicate with the ZOO Kernel inputs/outputs.
• ZOO Desktop Client: A Mozilla XULRunner based GIS desktop application able to execute WPS queries with both local and remote data.

The ZOO project goal is not to reinvent the wheel, but rather to take advantage of the existing libraries and to make them communicate in an easy way using ZOO Kernel WPS capabilities. Other OWS services such as WMS, WFS, WCS and SOS can be managed using MapServer and then used as input data by ZOO Server.

The ZOO OWS platform is able to load dynamic libraries (C/C++), Python modules and PHP scripts and to handle them as OWS services. For example, GDAL/OGR library is already implemented as a default service to be handled by ZOO Kernel . Indeed, any GDAL/OGR function can be run now using the web browser only.

Other famous OSGeo softwares, but also third-party applications and spatial models, are now being implemented as web services in order to support them in the ZOO and to provide complex and chainable geoprocessing functionnalities to Web GIS applications.