Geoweb Technology

Today professionals and laymen alike have access to geo-data through the internet. Using a smart phone or tablet connected to broadband internet one can virtually fly-through a city and view buildings, underground constructions and proposed designs from any viewing angle, even augmented reality. The internet also strengthens the communication between government and citizens, who can comment on the designs, fill in questionnaires and vote, and in this way (local) government may increase public participation in city planning and other public affairs.

Access to geo-web services should be fast en reliable and based on open standards such as OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium), ISO (International Organization for Standardization) and INSPIRE (European Spatial Data Infrastructure). The map interfaces should be user friendly while sufficient functionality should be available for carrying out analyses on the diverse datasets. A key tool when building geo-web services is Geography Markup Language (GML) an exchange language for geo-data based on XML (eXtensible Markup Language), one of the standard languages of the internet.

The course consists of four parts:

1. Principles, application, evaluation and integration of generic web services and the importance of using standards when building them. The standards involved start with general ICT standards like HTTP, XML and JSON. Increasingly the semantics of data in the framework of web services, and linked data, plays an important role.

2. Based on these general standards, geo-standards and protocols can be build (ISO TC-211/OGC web services and protocols). Combining the geo-standards and protocols results in a set of geo web services that more and more replace the traditional GIS tools. Topics of interest: geo-web system server-client architecture, WMS/WFS/... server, desktop/browser/mobile clients (incl. web application development), web-based transaction processing, portrayal, query (filter encoding), tiling, metadata service, web processing service, point cloud and vario-scale data services.

3. Principles and applications of (real-time) Sensor Web. The components of Sensor Web will be explained and (some of them) used: Observations and Measurements, Transducer Markup Language, Sensor Observation Service / Sensor Things, Sensor Planning Service, Sensor Alert Service and the Web Notification Service.

4. Applying software tools for the visualization of 3D geo-data. Normally the first, and in many cases the most important, thing to do with (3D) geo-data is to visualize it. Nowadays data is delivered over the internet by means of web services. The standards, architecture and services for 3D geo-visualization, and the practical aspects of available (web) tools and how to use them will be explored.