To become a true 'GIS' server, the final piece needed by GeoServer is to perform spatial operations and analysis on the data served. The competition has done this for years, and the flexible framework of GeoServer has enabled many to code one off functionality to handle the operations they need. But the recently released Web Processing Service of the OGC now provides a standardized framework to offer advanced processing services.
There is already a prototype implementation available as an unsupported plug-in to GeoServer. And recently OpenGeo developers spent some time integrating the amazing SEXTANTE geoalgorithm toolkit in to GeoTools and GeoServer. SEXTANTE provides over 220 spatial operations, for both vector and raster processing, giving a GeoServer WPS a big start. It will also draw on all the spatial operations available in the JTS Topology Suite.
While other WPS's offer these operations, the main advantage of making the WPS an integrated part of GeoServer is to allow it to avoid the performance bottleneck that plagues most existing WPS's - the production and parsing of GML and large image files. GeoServer will enable the processing to happen right when it reads the data from the database. This should help move WPS from a proof of concept to a powerful tool that's useful in a production environment. And operations like generalization and clustering should provide performance increases for WMS and WFS if utilized properly.
Past the basics there are a number of paths that could make the WPS great.
- A RESTful framework that can expose the operations just as easily as the WPS spec, but in a more web friendly way.
- Performing processing at the database level, utilizing the native spatial operations of PostGIS, Oracle, etc, to increase performance even more.
- Scripting of various processes to chain together operations efficiently, using popular scripting languages like Python, Javascript, Groovy, etc. Be able to define new WPS operations by composing a number of others together.
- Model builder: either get a desktop model builder like Sextante to easily talk to GeoServer over rest and WPS, or build a nice Javascript tool that allows one to do it all through the web. Have it output a script and define new WPS operations
Funding
This roadmap item was funded and will be a part of GeoServer 2.1.0 when it is released.
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Other Roadmap Items
Funded: GeoServer is now compliant with the latest WMS standard.
Currently features are only accessible via the Web Feature Service (WFS) API. REST feature access will provide a ”resource oriented“ approach to accessing geographic collections. It will also use the existing AtomPub specification to provide for feature viewing and editing.
Integrated Web Processing Service (WPS)
Funded: A WPS in GeoServer will be integrated into GeoServer 2.1 to perform real operations at the level of the data instead of relying on parsing GML or reading large raster files over the network like the standalone WPS implementations.