IMPLEMENTING GEOSPATIAL WEB SERVICES USING
SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE AND NOSQL
SOLUTIONS
Pouria Amirian, Anahid Basiri and Adam Winstanley
Department of Computer Science, National University of Ireland, Maynooth
amirian@cs.nuim.ie, anahid.basiri@nuim.ie, adam.winstanley@nuim.ie
ABSTRACT
Today a huge amount of geospatial data is being
created, collected and used more than ever before. The
ever increasing observations and measurements of geo-
sensor networks, satellite imageries, point clouds from
laser scanning, geospatial data of Location Based
Services (LBS) and location-based social networks has
become a serious challenge for data management and
analysis systems. Traditionally, Relational Database
Management Systems (RDBMS) were used to manage
and to some extent analyse the geospatial data.
Nowadays these systems can be used in many scenarios
but there are some situations when using these systems
may not provide the required efficiency and
effectiveness. In these situations, NoSQL solutions can
provide the efficiency necessary for applications using
geospatial data. At the other hand, In order to provide
full access to geospatial data, they have to be published
as standard-based resources over the Web. In other
words, custodians of geospatial data have to publish
standard-based services to serve geospatial resources in
interoperable and platform-independent manner. In this
regard, geospatial services must be designed and
developed using Service Orientation Architecture
(SOA) to provide full interoperability for diverse kinds
of end users. But in this context, nature of geospatial
data prevents full potential of using SOA in GIS world.
This paper proposes an approach to overcome the
mentioned issue using SOA and NoSQL solutions.
KEYWORDS
NoSQL, Service Oriented Architecture, Geospatial Web
Services
1 INTRODUCTION
Nowadays geospatial data have become central to
the practice of decision makers in private sectors as
well as most governmental organizations. The ever-
increasing access to geospatial data on the Web
enhanced system performance through cost/time
reduction. Moreover, such access helps decision-
makers to manage their assets better, enables faster
responses for time-sensitive decisions, and
improves the communication process across
diverse agencies. If geospatial data are accessed
and shared across diverse partners, different
organizations can save time and money by avoiding
data reproduction. Also Information exchanges can
solve problems relating to inconsistencies and
quality differences in the geospatial data from
various sources. In this regard, geospatial data
should be shared and accessed using standard
services which are openly published over the Web.
In this context, there are generally two approaches
for publishing geospatial data over Web in standard
manner.
The first approach is to use the specifications
published and managed by Open Geospatial
Consortium (OGC). The mentioned specifications
consist of defined set of request/responses to access
geospatial resources (such as metadata associated
with geospatial data, image of geospatial data or
geospatial data in Geography Markup Language -
GML- format).
The second approach is to use web services
technologies and use the standard messaging and
standard interface definition mechanisms. The
mentioned standard messaging and standard
interface mechanisms are inherent to web services
technologies and there is no need to predefine set
of request/response in order to exposing geospatial
resource over the web.
Note that these two approaches are just standard
approaches for exposing geospatial resources over
the web. There are also other approaches that
utilize proprietary and platform-dependant
solutions for exposing geospatial resources. This
paper focuses on standard approaches.
ISBN: 978-0-9891305-0-9 ©2013 SDIWC
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