Thought about Standards

What choice is left when standardization defeats its purpose. I am talking about WFS again.

My understanding of WFS it that it is supposed to define interactions between clients and a servers. Unfortunately it appears WFS is clearly not the best fit for domain specific applications. It's not that it is not good to describe data or metadata. It's that it is not intuitive enough, not compact enough and to complex when it comes to develop a domain specific application. It can be good to move data around, yet again, other mechanism are simpler and more powerful. 

I have recently turned to another solution for my projects with great success so far.

Thanks for reading and feel free to leave comments!

Thought about real-time -- Web services

Here is the question: How to provide real time updates through web services?

That is a good question. Yet, there are no answers when we look at the OGC web services standards.

Of course, it is always possible to use polling with WMS, WFS or even with a KML service. But polling has a huge performance cost.

The HTML 5 specification brings a cool concept, web sockets which would allow push notification. But we are not there just yet.

So how could it be achieved? Well, look at the all the real-time social services available online! How do they achieve that over the web?

The answer is long polling. But it comes at the cost of interoperability since implementing long polling requires changes to the services specification.

The real answer has to come from the standard bodies.

Thanks for reading, let me know what you think!

Thought about web client -- OpenLayers

OpenLayers is a free and open source web map client. OpenLayers supports many types of layers of different sources, from the most open standards to the latest industry technology.

OpenLayers takes advantage of the new HTML5 functionalities, providing better, more performant experience to the user. It allows rich interactivity in a highly portable technology, namely JavaScript.

Examples

For OpenLayers examples, visit: http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/

Thought about Spatial Databases -- PostGIS

The spatial database is the most important component in any GIS system. Remember, the data depends on it.

A good spatial databases must perform complex spatial request efficiently and that is just what PostGIS is able to do!

PostGIS adds support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL object-relational database. In effect, PostGIS "spatially enables" the PostgreSQL server, allowing it to be used as a backend spatial database for geographic information systems (GIS).

PostGIS has been developed by Refractions Research as a project in open source spatial database technology. PostGIS is released under the GNU General Public License, making it a Free and Open Source Software.

Installation

• First step: download and install PostgreSQL
• Second step: download and install PostGIS
• Third step (Optional but recommanded): download and install pgadmin

Thought about Spatial Database -- SQL Server 2008 R2 +

The spatial database is the most important component in any GIS system. Remember, the data depends on it.

A good spatial databases must perform complex spatial request efficiently and that is just what SQL Server is able to do!

If you are using a Microsoft stack, it could very well be a good idea to store your spatial data on SQL Server.

SQL Server 2008 R2 is Microsoft database solution and it now supports geospatial types and indexing. Even though SQL Server 2008 R2 come at some licensing cost, it could be the best choice for your infrastructure if your infrastructure is built on Microsoft technology.

SQL Server 2008 R2 provies comprehensive spatial support that enables developers to create location-aware applications for businesses and consumers.

Thougth about iOS 6 Maps app -- My impressions

Having just completed my iPhone upgrade to iOS 6. I had to try the new built in maps application.

I tried the new turn by turn function and really liked it. Unfortunately, the quality of the satellite maps and the lack of traffic information is a huge disappointment for my city. The 3D buildings look really nice in New-York, but this feature is not available in many cities. The way tiles are loaded and cached can be improved.

Waiting for Apple to improve the quality of the satellite map in my region,I will be using Google Maps web app for mobiles.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to comment.

Thought about KML -- The pros

The problem is common, how to display geospatial information from different sources in a GIS application in a standard way?

KML was first developed by a company named Keyhole as a presentation model for their revolutionizing Earth Viewer latter renamed Google Earth.

KML goes beyond other OGC encoding standard by allowing to specify how Features should be displayed on the map, but also in the treeview.

KML allows to describe how the camera should be positioned to visualize a feature, how the camera should move around the globe.

Kml also allows to describe the time dimension of a features.

Allowing the server to specify how features should be displayed can be quite powerful when combined with the user interaction user gains with vectors; specially when compared with WMS.

Of course KML is not perfect, it has multiple limitations. Since nothing is perfect, KML can often be the best choice.

Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think about it.