Whoever it was, they apparently forgot to tell Christopher Schmidt. When you put OpenLayers together with his new WPServer application, several standard GIS operations are as easy as clicking a button. And WPServer is available under the same license as FeatureServer OpenLayers .
Here’s an animated GIF showing the fun I had playing around with the WPServer Demo:
What I did:
- Added several polygons in stream mode representing the Mediterranean and islands
- Ran a symmetric difference on all of these polygons, to create a single hole-y polygon
- Smoothed (a bit too much) the polygon
- Buffered the entire polygon
- Generated a convex hull
- Added another polygon (it looked too much like a mushroom to resist)
- Buffered the new polygon
- Dissolved the two polygons together
- Replaced the dissolved polygon with a centroid
- Buffered the centroid
- Generalized (not as much this time) the polygon
What was the point? Well beyond having fun, just being able to create the initial complex hole-y polygon was something that I hadn’t seen in web-based GIS before. Very cool. All of the other operations were useful too, though maybe not so much in this example. Do yourself a favour and play around with it a bit.
What’s the downside? Christopher can no longer say that he doesn’t do GIS :)
-J
#1 by Anonymous on March 15, 2008 - 10:33 pm
WPServer == WPS Web Processing Service Implementation ???
#2 by Jason Birch on March 16, 2008 - 2:45 pm
Not really. Sort of. :)
As the page behind the link says, WPServer is a proof-of-concept or testbed for RESTful WPS. But it’s definitely not implementing OGC WPS.