Geoserver 2.1 and Inspire View Service Requirements

We currently host Inspire View Services for two customers using GeoServer. Since Geoserver 2.1 the required WMS 1.3 is available, and an Inspire extension is available to add some extra required fields to the capabilities document. However the View Services in Geoserver are not yet fully conformant to the Inspire requirements.

Some points of non-conformance:
- In the keywordlist a reference should be made to which thesaurus the keyword is coming from
- For every layer for every available CRS a bbox should be provided in that CRS
- In the top layer a authority url should be provided, referencing the publishing organisations website
- In every layer a identfier should be available referencing the
dataset (which is also mentioned in the metadata for data and
metadata for services records)

Note that this only applies to scenario 1 (where a metadata for service record is available). And only 1 language supported (which is also default language).

The dutch government proposed a 'workaround' to be able to use products like Geoserver and still be compliant. The capabilities document can be manually altered and saved anywere on the web. In the metadata for service record a hyperlink should be included to the altered capabilities document (however i don't know of any viewer supporting this workaround)

examle of altered capabilities document

Most of these short-comings also exist in the deegree project. Although the developers convinced me they're nearly there.

OSGeo hacking event bolsena

It's been a while since i published an article... But here it is.
So i'm spending some days at the OSGeo hacking event in Bolsena.
Listened to some nice presentations about Talend Open Studio Spatial Plug-in, deegree, inspire, openSDMX and Heron-mc. I played a little with deegree. the guys from Bonn really did a nice job implementing the Inspire data schema's. I tested the hydropraphy data schema and the metadata store. Ok, it's not all perfect yet, some Inspire requirements are missing (even for view services), but i'm really surprised nobody is using deegree to host Inspire services up till now. Esri must really be big in Germany. I think it will change soon, because deegree (compared to others) is totally ready for download services.

Also i tested the metdatastore in deegree, since deegree 3 doesn't have a csw-search-interface itself, i used the excat javascript search tool, a very light weight csw-search option. Unfortunately it didn't work out of the box. Somehow excat uses lowercase fieldnames where deegree expected first letter uppercase. With some changes in cswclient.xml and getrecords.xsl it all worked fine (line44 escape should be escapeChar, title -> Title etc)

http://wiki.deegree.org/deegreeWiki/DownloadPage
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Bolsena_Code_Sprint_2011
http://spatialdataintegrator.org
http://heron-mc.org
http://www.couchbase.org
http://sourceforge.net/p/opensdmx
http://www.gdsc.nl/gdsc/software/simple_csw_client

proj4js can't find proj4js.js because it's called proj4js-compressed.js

in proj4js there is a getScriptLocation function which retrieves the path of the current script by looping over the script tags in the document. Unfortunately the function won't find the scriptlocation if your script is called proj4js-compressed.js in stead of proj4js.js.

This results in proj4js won't find extra projections, which results in errors in your page when trying to call a non standard projection.

So change the name of the script to proj4js.js (or include the needed projections by hand)

And if you need EPSG:102113 (the Esri alternative for the common mercator projection), copy EPSG900913.js to EPSG:102113.js and change ['EPSG:900913'] to ['EPSG:102113'].

one week open source primer

A company asked us to provide a one week open source primer for their employee's. This is the program we proposed:

mo:
Quantum GIS
Mapserver, Gdal

tu:
Udig
GeoServer

we:
PostGIS
GeoKettle

th:
OpenLayers, GeoExt
MapBender

fr:
GeoNetwork
Oracle, Autocad and Esri support in Open Source Apps

Bolsena Hacking Event 2010

These days i'm in Italy to visit the Bolsena Hacking Event 2010. A group of open source GIS developers meets every year to work on several projects. I'm here to work with GeoCat developers on a ArcGIS-GeoNetwork bridge extension. But in the meanwhile I have interesting discussions with and presentations of developers of GeoServer, MapBender, Deegree, GeoCouchDB, GeojQuery, OpenLayers, Inspire and Grass. Send me a message if you'd like to bring in a subject.