The members of the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) have approved version 1.0 of the OpenGIS® Web Processing Service (WPS) Interface Standard.
The WPS standard defines an interface that facilitates the publishing of geospatial processes and makes it easier to write software clients that can discover and bind to those processes. Processes include any algorithm, calculation or model that operates on spatially referenced raster or vector data. Publishing means making available machine-readable binding information as well as human-readable metadata that allows service discovery and use.
A WPS can be used to define calculations as simple as subtracting one set of spatially referenced data from another (e.g., determining the difference in influenza cases between two different seasons), or as complicated as a hydrological model. The data required by the WPS can be delivered across a network or it can be made available at the server. This interface specification provides mechanisms to identify the spatially referenced data required by the calculation, initiate the calculation, and manage the output from the calculation so that the client can access it.
The OGC’s WPS standard will play an important role in automating workflows that involve geospatial data and geoprocessing services.
The OGC® is an international consortium of more than 345 companies, government agencies, research organizations, and universities participating in a consensus process to develop publicly available geospatial standards. OpenGIS® Standards support interoperable solutions that “geo-enable” the Web, wireless and location-based services, and mainstream IT. OGC Standards empower technology developers to make geospatial information and services accessible and useful with any application that needs to be geospatially enabled. Visit the OGC website at http://www.opengeospatial.org/.
[opengeospatial]
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
There are some interesting discussions about the topic if Google Maps or related Products like Yahoo! Maps, Live Maps, virtual Earth or Google Earth can be defined as Geographic Information Systems (GIS).
By definition Geographic Information Systems are:
- Burrough, P.A., 1986: Principles of Geographic Information Systems for Land Resoures Assessment, Oxford
A powerful set of tools for collecting, storing, retrieving at will, transforming, and displaying spatial data from the real world for a particular set of purposes.
- Hemenway, 1989:
A GIS is a computer system designed to allow users to collect, manage, and analyze large volumes of spatially referenced and associated attribute data.
- Clarke, 1986:
A computer based system for the capture, storage,retrieval, analysis and display of spatial data.
- Dept. of Environment (1987):
A GIS is a system for capturing, storing, checking, integrating, manipulating, analysing and displayiong data which are spatially referenced to the Earth.
- Rhind, 1989:
A GIS is a computer system that can hold and use data descirbing places on the earth’s surface.
- Goodchild, 1985:
… a system which uses a spatial database to provide answers to queries of a geographical nature. … Since putting spatial data into a computer at great expense for the sole purpose of getting it out again would be pointless, a GIS must allow a variety of manipulations to be carried out, such as sorting, selective retrieval, calculation and spatial analysis and modelling. We also expect a full range of functions to allow input of data in map form, and cartographic output …
- Strobl, 1988:
Systeme zur Erfassung, Speicherung, Prüfung, Manipulation, Integration, Analyse und Darstellung von Daten, die sich auf räumliche Objekte beziehen …
- Bill/Fritsch, 1994: Grundlagen der Geo-Informationssysteme. Band 1: Hardware, Software und Daten, 2. Aufl., Karlsruhe:
Ein Geo-Informationssystem ist ein rechnergestütztes System, das aus Hardware, Software, Daten und den Anwendungen besteht. Mit ihm können raumbezogene Daten digital erfaßt und redigiert, gespeichert und reorganisiert, modelliert und analysiert sowie alphanumerisch und graphisch präsentiert werden.
- Wikipedia, 2008:
A geographic information system (GIS), also known as a geographical information system or geospatial information system, is a system for capturing, storing, analyzing and managing data and associated attributes which are spatially referenced to the Earth.
The question is: Should all aspects a GIS can have, be fullfilled that you can define a system as GIS?
Can you “do” some GIS functionality with Google Maps. Yes, Expample 1 and Example 2.
Can you “do” as much GIS with Google Maps as you can do for example with ESRI? No.
Some other interesting questions are: In which directions GIS is going in the future? Is there a trend from Desktop GIS to Web GIS? Is there a market for both strategies in the future?
[inspired by spatiallyadjusted]
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
Mashups are very popular right now. But what does the word Mashup really mean? Mashups allows the user to compose imformation from different data sources and represent this combined information in a way he or she defines.
Google promoted this term recently and also created the term maplets which in fact is nothing else than the possibility to use information on the web an display this information on a map, in this case on Google Maps. But also Yahoo offers the possibility to create so called mashups. They provide a tool called Yahoo pipes. This is an visual editor for creating mashups in any variation and for different application fields. I tested it for about 10 minutes and produced a mahsup that visualize new of an austria newpaper on a map. The result is shown here:
Pipe Web Address: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=5edca8ae0ec23801f589ee7f6e827199
The Yahoo Pipe application is easy to use and with some practice you could imagine how the result will look like. The flexibility is quite high. So it is possible to integrate every feed of a homepage. Additionally Yahoo services, like flickr or Yahoo local search are supported. It would be more open and flexible if also services from other companies are integrated. A drawback I noticed is that the result can not be embedded easily into your own homepage or blog. But I think Yahoo Pipes is under development progress and will include other functionallity in the future.
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
I’m currently looking for some interesting open source or freeware GIS desktop software. To answer the question about an alternative for ArcGIS, Intergraph Geomedia or MapInfo I will introduce some alternative freeware GIS tools. The first application I found on the net is uDig.
What is uDig?
uDig is an GIS software program produced by a community led by Canadian-based company Refractions Research. It is based around the Eclipse platform and features full layered Open Source GIS. It is written in Java and released under GNU Lesser General Public License.
Project Outline
The goal of uDig is to provide a complete Java solution for desktop GIS data access, editing, and viewing. uDig aims to be:
- User friendly, providing a familiar graphical environment for GIS users;
- Desktop located, running as a thick client, natively on Windows, Mac OS/X and Linux;
- Internet oriented, consuming standard (WMS, WFS, WCS) and de facto (GeoRSS, KML, tiles) geospatial web services; and,
- GIS ready, providing the framework on which complex analytical capabilities can be built, and gradually subsuming those capabilities into the main application.
[http://udig.refractions.net]
Written and submitted from Home, using my 802.11g WiFi network.
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