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 & 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 & Measurements, Transducer Markup Language, Sensor Observation Service, 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.
After the course the student is able to:
- understand generic internet and web standards and apply these in the implementation of web information systems
- describe the existing formal geo-standards, derived implementation specifications and related geo web services and their application domains
- understand the Sensor Web Enablement Common Data Framework (common data models and schema) and the SensorML (models and schema for sensor systems and processes surrounding measurements) and use them in web services
- describe the available (visualization) standards for the visualization of 3D geo-data, like X3D, 3D-pdf, WebGL, CityGML, KML, GeoJSON, glTF, b3dm, i3s and other industry standards / software tools
- integrate several geo web services for supporting spatial decision making
- evaluate existing geo web services in terms of specified applications and give motivated suggestions for improvement
