An Open RESTful Architecture for Geospatial Web Services

One of critical challenges facing many organizations around the world is that of interoperability, integrating islands of technology that characterize most IT organizations. For example, organizations with an engineering focus typically have islands of technology such as CAD, mobile, GIS, and tabular financial and business systems, many of which are proprietary, often legacy, developed by different vendors, and which are incompatible in various ways with each other. Productivity and efficiency are the business forces which are forcing IT organizations to look for ways to break down the barriers between islands of technology. The most important technical advance that provided a foundation for interoperability is open standards. But integrating diverse systems from different vendors still remains a challenge because of issues of performance, scalability, reliability, and security. To begin to address this challenged we outline an open architectures based on REST (Representational State Transfer) that provides geospatial data web services. As an example, we then describe a RESTful implementation developed by Haris Kurtagic of the Feature Data Object Application Programming Interface (FDO API) project of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation(OSGEO) which exposes a full geospatial web services data API for creating, editing and querying geospatial data.