Slashgeo

The OSGeo Journal offers a nice article named "Evaluation of the OGC Web Processing Service for Use in a Client-Side GIS" by Christopher Michael and Daniel P. Ames [pdf, 330k]. The abstract: "The Open Geospatial Consortium Web Processing Service proposed specification is intended as a solution for developing web-based geoprocessing plugins, and for easily sharing algorithms and geoprocessing functionality. This paper seeks to evaluate the WPS proposal with respect to feasibility and potential utility, and to identify areas for improvement. Challenges with the WPS proposal are discussed together with potential solutions. Several potential enhancements to the WPS proposal are introduced and considered, including a mechanism to guide client applications in prompting for correct data and a means to list the data available on a server."

Anonymous Voxel writes "An old (but still interesting) news from geoserver blog: Theodor Foerster, of 52North and ITC, has been leveraging GeoServer in his work on generalization of geospatial data using the new Web Processing Service specification. He recently posted some nice new work, including updates to the Web Processing Service web app, as well as a new WPS client written as a plug-in to uDig. Awhile ago he also did some prototypes of integrating the WPS with GeoServer, making the WPS a datastore that could be served out as WMS and WFS. It’s great to see new open source tools being built that can use and leverage the work we’ve done with GeoServer. You can see his work in action, with GeoServer, in the screencast that he’s also posted.

Eventually we’re hoping to be able to offer some integration between GeoServer and his WPS work, possibly as a plug-in to GeoServer that makes it really easy to install both, and to do common data configuration through our web gui. In the past we’ve also talked to the FROGS WPS community about possible integrations as well. Since we’re evolving GeoServer to be a platform it makes a lot of natural sense to be able to bring WPS in to the mix, in some form. It looks like the FROGS people are also leveraging Spring, which may help compatibility as well (we haven’t talked to them for awhile so I suppose we can just cross our fingers that they’re looking at what we’ve done). So if anyone has the time or the money to get a WPS integrated with GeoServer, let us know, as we’ve got some great pieces to work with."

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."

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.

All Points Blog informs us the Open Geospatial Consortium as signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Open Grid Forum: "The initial goals of the collaboration include: * Integrate OGC's OpenGIS Web Processing Service (WPS) Specification with a range of "back-end" processing environments to enable large-scale processing. [...] * Integration of WPS with workflow management tools. [...] * Integration of OGC federated catalogs/data repositories with grid data movement tools. OGF’s GridFTP is one possibility that supports secure, third-party transfers that are useful when moving data from a repository to a remote service." Here's the Open Grid Forum website. See also this previous story on a geospatial grid project in Germany.

The Open Geospatial Consortium announced that the Web Processing Service (WPS) is now an approved standard with its version 1.0. From the PR: "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." See also related stories below.

The GRASS GIS team announced the release of GRASS GIS 6.3.0. From the announcement: "Officially this is a "technology preview" release, the first beta on the path to GRASS 6.4-stable, and it also marks the start of work on GRASS 7. As such GRASS 6.3.0 is not intended to be a stable release with ongoing support, but after five months of quality-assurance review we are very pleased with the results. Users can be confident to use this version for their day to day work, indeed due to the open development model many already do.

Besides the hundreds of new module features, supported data formats, and language translations, GRASS 6.3 brings a number of exciting enhancements to the GIS. A prototype of the new wxPython user interface is debuted, and for the first time since its inception with a port from the VAX 11/780 in 1983, GRASS will run on a non-UNIX based platform: MS-Windows. This is currently still in an experimental state and we hope that widespread testing of 6.3.0 will mean the 6.4 release of WinGRASS will be fully functional and robust. Existing UNIX and Mac users will be happy to know that these new features do not disrupt the base GIS which remains as solid as ever and fully backwards compatible with earlier GRASS 6.0 and GRASS 6.2 releases." See also related stories below.