Geo Processing Over the Web

There’s a couple of different efforts going on to do web processing over the web — in an effort to understand what it’s all about, I put together a little web processing server and a demo to go along with it.

WPServer Demo

Using OGR and the GEOS operators built into it, it allows one to do operations I’m told are common: buffering, centroid, convex hull, and dissolve.

The source for these operations is simple: as few as 8 lines to define your own operation, as the OGRGeos operators and the Shapely buffer operation show.

The Boston Routing Demo is also now using WPServer to do its routing, via the PGrouting action.

Although WPServer shares an acronym with OGC’s WPS, it doesn’t yet implement WPS — however, like FeatureServer, it has a pluggable frontend architecture for determining the types of actions to perform… but only REST + GeoJSON are supported so far 🙂

I think it’s a pretty looking demo, even if I’m not sure if it’s useful at all.

6 Responses to “Geo Processing Over the Web”

  1. Web Processing Over the Web Says:

    […] You can read the rest of this blog post by going to the original source, here […]

  2. FantomPlanet Says:

    Chris, awesome! Good work.

  3. Giraud Pierre Says:

    This is the kind of things I like to see.
    With this demo, I wonder if this would a good idea to have a polygon hole cutter tool (control + handler) directly in OpenLayers, or if a simple difference operation would also do the job (and probably faster).
    I don’t think this is so much work to add the difference in the OGRGeos operators. I will probably have a look soon.

  4. Sean Gillies Says:

    No need to apologize for HTTP only. It’s good enough 🙂

  5. Guillaume Sueur Says:

    It’s completely useful and operationnal. These are things that make GIS to webGIS at all ! Congrats !

  6. Mateusz Loskot Says:

    Chris, this is another fantastic tree from your forest. But could you direct me where can I find syntax of your WPS requests and responses?