Slashgeo

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.

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.

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.

GIS Monitor reviews MetaCarta’s recently released Local Alerts service for the digital publishing industry which allows registered users to receive email alerts when news happens in their area of interest. From the article: “MetaCarta uses its core technology to geoparse and geotag the stories in real time and puts them in a database, which also stores the information on all of the registrants and the max-min lat-long of their area of interest. The company then maps out all the stories and alerts users to any stories that contain geographic references that fall within the range they have specified.”.

Several recent entries have discussed the newly available demo of WPServer, a web processing server which allow geoprocessing over an Internet connexion. Here's the must-read followup entry: "Want your shapefiles on a map? Use FeatureServer. Want to buffer each of the points in your FeatureServer-served data? Serialize them, and pass them up to WPServer, then display the data that comes back. Want to mix in KML data, to see the intersections? Add a KML layer to OpenLayers, and use WPServer to do the intersections. Crap. I think what OpenLayers can do now might actually be something people would refer to as GIS." Spatially Adjusted discuss this demo and is impressed. Random Nodes also shares his thoughts on this web-based GIS solution. import cartography even claim this open source approach may beat ArcGIS Server directly, this tells you how important the matter is. See also the two previous stories on WPS in the related stories below. Related, there's the release of PyWPS 2.0.