Automated approach to Standards Compliance amongst Vendors of Georeferenced Imagery
One of the challenges currently facing the Geospatial Industry is the lack of wide spread adoption of open standards. However, the release of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards has proven that by cooperating its is possible for all involved in the Industry to benefit, intern generating inovation and opening previously unexplored application domains.
The Industry is data driven with the main players being data producers, vendors and consumers. Poor up-take of standards at the consumers-vendor interface has meant a poor consumer experience. A typical geospatial data consumer working on a given GIS project may have to obtain data from several vendors each one implementing their own ordering and delivery systems. The consumers may need data that is customised for their particular project. This can include parameters such as spatial reference systems and resolutions, and data types and formats. There may also be varying time-constraints on delivery.
Web Coverage Service (WCS) is an OGC standard that facilitates the delivery of georeferenced imagery products. From our research no vendor today uses it to deliver data to their customers. The lack of compliance from vendors is possibly due to the cost and effort required to change their current setup being greater than the need to migrate to the new data dissemination practices.
This paper describes the project undertaken by Nomad-Labs to test the technical feasibility of building an e-commerce portal for the online-delivery of Geospatial data. Its focus is to ease a vendor's migration to standards-compliance for online data delivery, while taking into consideration the vendor's ongoing management and maintenance of their data products. It proposes an online data delivery mechanism which, while being standards-compliant, is also more interactive and intuitive from the customers point-of-view; giving them the options to select their preferred delivery mechanism, data format, resolution and reference system.