The OpenGIS Web Feature Service specification allows a client to retrieve and update geospatial data encoded in Geography Markup Language (GML) from multiple WFS. The specification defines interfaces for data access and manipulation operations on geographic features using HTTP as the distributed computing platform. Via these interfaces, a Web user or service can combine, use, and manage geodata, the feature information behind a map image, from various sources.
Published in Chapter:
Spatial Data Integration Over the Web
Laura Díaz (Universitat Jaume I, Spain), Carlos Granell (Universitat Jaume I, Spain), and Michael Gould (Universitat Jaume I, Spain)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 9
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-242-8.ch036
Abstract
Spatial data are increasingly becoming available on the Internet in applications such as routing portals that involve map-based and satellite imagery backgrounds, allowing a large audience to access and share the rich databases that are currently used by the specialized geographic community. These spatial data are heterogeneous, being available in various formats, and stored in disparate formats (flat files, relational or object-oriented databases, etc.). Some data are structured according to well-established data modeling techniques such as the relational or object-oriented data models; other data, such as data maintained in various information systems, spreadsheets, or Internet repositories, are in proprietary formats, semistructured, or unstructured. In practice, this situation of multiple models and schemas combined with the difficulty for establishment agreements for data representation in the application domains becomes spatial data in special regarding other types of scientific data, making the interoperability problem a nontrivial task (Lemmens, Wytzisk, de By, Granell, Gould & van Oosterom, 2006). In addition to the scale of data integration, the complex and heterogeneous query processing and domain-specific computational capabilities supported by these sources make spatial data integration a real challenge (Boulcema, Essid & Lacroix, 2002; Devogele, Parent & Spaccapietra, 1998; Goodchild, Egenhofer, Fegeas & Kottman, 1999).