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REST and GIS Explained

posted by Satri on Saturday August 11, @03:19PM   Printer-friendly   Email story  Permalink  Trackback URI  Slashdotthis  Diggthis  Del.icio.us
from the your-weekly-dose-of-REST dept.
GIS Technology
Anonymous Voxel writes "From rajsingh.org blog: REST has been a hot topic this year in the geo world. There’s a discussion group, a geographic data server, many blog posts, and email discussions. I’ve been mulling over what this means to OGC over the last couple months, reading RESTful Web Services, and discussing with the various advocates around the community. After all this, I think I know what’s going on, but I don’t think there’s any one clear explanation (despite some nice pieces of the puzzle here and here) available, and there has certainly been little effort to analyze the REST architecture in relation to geographic information systems theory, so that’s what I’ll try to do now." See related stories below.

Related Stories

REST and GIS 4 comments [+]
The It is what it is blog has a nice summary of what is REST and its implication for GIS. From the entry: "State Transfer in the public standards-based GIS world (where REST really starts to achieve critical mass) is still all about the read-only flow of data from publishers to browsers. [...] Just becaues those resources have lat/longs doesn't mean that GIS should suddenly be the center of the universe. Why do I have to use KML for resources that probably have extremely rich alternate representations already?" This is the first of a series of upcoming entries.
Industry: REST Interest at the OGC [+]
Remember the previous entry on REST and GIS? Could RESTful webmapping become OGC standards? The cfis and import cartography blogs discuss new REST interest at the Open Geospatial Consortium. Here's the second post and the third. From the third post: "Everything that's wrong the the WxS Suite (that's a fancy acronym for Web Map Server, Web Feature Server, Web Context Server, etc.) boils down to one thing - they are based on the fundamentaly flawed concept of service endpoints. A service endpoint is a program sitting on the network that defines its own API."
Geospatial Web Services and REST 1 comment [+]
Geoblogs have been regularly covering REST technology and geospatial applications lately, see the related stories below. Directions Mag offers an informative article named Emerging Technology: Geospatial Web Services and REST which reduces the confusion with REST, SOAP, GET and POST. From the article's introduction: "However, when considering the evolution of geospatial Web services, it turns out that explaining REST and clarifying the discussion suggests the need for a proposal of how to apply REST to geospatial Web services. Such a proposal might help the open source and open standards communities establish better techniques to make geospatial Web services more open and accessible." Meanwhile, you have import cartography explaining how KML could be published in a RESTful manner, and the same blog also suggests serious (?) corrections to the DM article.
Slashgeo: Poll Results on Geoprofessionals and New Poll on REST [+]
The previous poll regarding who's doing geospatial work at your office gave these results, out of 54 votes: 42% of geospatial tasks are done by geospatial professionals, 25% are done by a diversified mix of professionals, 11% from computer scientists which learned geospatial stuff, other interesting results include only 3% from certified geospatial professionals and 5% by someone not qualified!

The new poll ask you about REST and GIS, a hot topic in the geospatial world this summer, and no, we're not talking about that kind of rest.
Industry: ArcGIS Explorer Updated and Other ESRI-related News 2 comments [+]
Mapperz provide details about ArcGIS Explorer's new build 410, ESRI's virtual globe, which includes many improvements. Spatially Adjusted also has an entry on the new build, but also on the release of the CAD Client for ArcSDE 9.2, a discussion on SharpMap, as an alternative to ESRI's MapObjects and finally, an interesting discussion on choosing MapDotNet instead of ArcIMS. Read more below to learn more about these products. From the last link: "That just scares me working with ESRI server software. I feel like I’m being priced out of the marketplace with their new tools. The days of writing simple and cheap Avenue or MapObjects application are over. Now you need superstars who know ArcObjects in and out and clients where price is no option. Maybe the RESI API will change this (or maybe not), but if you look around there are tons of tools available for you to use that won’t mess with your workflows and might just allow you to improve you output without spending tens of thousands of dollars."
Slashgeo: REST Poll Results and New Poll on Geospatial Presence [+]
Despite regular REST coverage this summer (see related stories below), 48% of the 60 answers clearly show how REST is not understood by most geospatial professionals. Of the other half, 26% claim RESTful approaches will prevail, and 16% are waiting for the Open Geospatial Consortium to join the bandwagon. 8% say they don't need REST themselves and no one said REST will have no impact, probably meaning REST is really important. Our new poll ask you about your feelings on the extent of geospatial technology presence on the web. Unrelated, I'll now try to catch up the 1000+ geonews item I missed in the last two weeks due to my accident, expect more stories.
Open Source Browser-Based AtomPub GIS Client [+]
The MetaCarta Labs demonstrate the world’s first Open Source Browser-Based AtomPub GIS Client. Try AtomPub in action via OpenLayers and FeatureServer right here, try it, it's surprising how easy it is to modify vector data. The CFIS blog adds more info on AtomPub and GIS interoperability, as well as this older entry from import cartography on AtomPub, KML and Google Earth. This is perfect timing considering RESTful knowledge amongst us. From the MetaCarta lab: " MetaCarta Labs is strongly in support of RESTful technology around GIS. FeatureServer is a REST-based geographic feature storage engine, which includes relatively complete Atom Publishing Protocol support. Using FeatureServer and OpenLayers, it is possible to create an AtomPub client, which uses input from the user to create geometries, and allows users to modify and save their changes, all via Atom + GeoRSS."
Industry: Building a Geoportal with Open Source Software [+]
Late last December the Fuzzy Tolerance blog ran a nice demonstration of building a geoportal with open source software such as OpenLayers, TileCache, GeoServer, PostGIS, jQuery, REST and AJAX. Here's the resulting geospatial portal. From the blog: "From a developer’s perspective, the biggest advantages I’ve found with OpenLayers-Tilecache-jQuery-REST is speed and simplicity. The beta site went from an empty text file to release in only a few weeks of actual development time nestled in between other projects, with a lot of that taken up by a jQuery/OpenLayers/GeoServer/SLD learning curve, design, web service work, software setup, etc. It is also marvelously simple, being nothing more than Javascript and HTML. From an end-user perspective, you get a much more responsive application, a nicer map interface than I usually give people via OpenLayers, and everything is free and open source." I copied below some of the previous Slashgeo stories regarding the software used in the demonstration.
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