[georss] Design consideration in incorprating georss gml into environmental data schema

[Andrew Turner]

On Sun, Apr 13, 2008 at 4:51 PM, Louis Sweeny
<louis.sweeny at ross-assoc.com> wrote:
> I work with www.exchangenetwork.net basically a partnership for
>  environmental data web services. We have COI's who develop complex rich
>  sets of schema for the hard core data (like water quality)
>
>  Members have experimented with GML, but it turns out that 90% of our
>  services can get by with the georss gml subset so we are moving forward
>  with recommendations that our mish-mash of ad hoc tags for lat/long
>  points and line/areas be replaced with georss tags as people rev their
>  schema.
>
>  I'm scratching my head about a few design issues (some of which the list
>  has already kicked around):
>
>  1) Is there any benefit to adoption of the "where" construct in complex
>  data schema? For example are there now or are there likely to be
>  services out there that would be able to scan a big file, with 7 levels
>  of hierarchy, find some "where" tags and take a guess as to what to do
>  with them? Or is the where construct envisioned just for rss feeds.

I know someone else more GML-happy will pipe-in on this with talk of
Schemas & XSD's. So I'll leave that to them.

However to simply answer your question: yes. People are using
GeoRSS-Simple and -GML in a number of their own XML schemas and using
GeoRSS as the location markup. (see ObsRSS for one example that may
interest you).

>
>  2) We are trying to make our data services (e.g. GetWaterQualityData)
>  play well with geo services like wfs, wms and geo-rss services, so that,
>  for example, one could find a monitoring station via an rss or wms
>  service and then use our data service to drill down to the rich data.
>  That is making us realize that we want to complement our data services
>  with wfs/wms and rss feeds, so that folk can get to the data however
>  they want.  Anything anybody can think of, re the WAY we incorprate gml
>  tags into these data services that would make this easier or harder?

The simplest would be to publish a GeoRSS feed of all the monitoring
station locations (and make it searchable by BBOX). And each Entry
would link to the the GeoRSS feed of that particular station that
would include the individual measurements as individual entries and
some sort of Obs XML for actually marking up the measurements.

I would suggest offering, in addition to a WFS, this very simple
solution of a hierarchy of linked GeoRSS feeds (Atom) of stations and
then observations. That will greatly aid in understanding of potential
users of the service.

at least, those are just my thoughts. Definitely interested to hear
what you develop in the end.
Andrew




-- 
Andrew Turner
andrew at mapufacture.com
http://mapufacture.com - Helping build the Geospatial Web