Dear GeoServer users, my company develops systems in meteorology, climatology, radiation monitoring etc. It's mostly data collection, storing and later retrieval. Our customers started to demand maps, recently.
What we need is a map client serving customers' data, both rasters (e.g. forecasts from GRIB files) and vector (e.g. various values measured by stations from a national climatology network). We looked out for some options and settled on a combination of a GeoServer & OpenLayers integrated into our existing web interface. After several weeks of playing with GeoServer I got an impression that GeoServer works great in combination with a local PostGIS instance. PostGIS fits well into our scenario, too: it would contain metadata about our rasters with time dimensions, and whole vector layers. The problem is we already have our own infrastructure which does all the bookkeeping of all our datasets. E.g. we already store our raster data somewhere in the filesystem and there is a table in our database which tracks metadata (origin, time, etc.) about these rasters. For climatology data, we use Oracle database and have our own schema which stores information about weather stations (e.g. name, location) and current and historical measured values. Because of this, my manager does not want to allow me to create a PostGIS instance along with a GeoServer instance. His arguments is it's unnecessary duplicity, it won't be consistent with our database unless we invest heavily in syncing the two and it needs additional maintenance. His original idea was that our system will provide data to a GeoServer instance via some Web Service / WFS / whatever and GeoServer will just "render" it. The problem is our system does not have a WFS interface (yet?) and our existing interfaces are not OGC standardized. Of course, if we implement WFS we won't need GeoServer (mostly). I tried to explain to him that we should treat the PostGIS store as some kind of internal GeoServer store (just like various index files on disk - he is a database guy and does not care about all those files created by GeoServer - he cares about databases) and not try to mess with it in order to speed up development (deadlines are tight, as usual). I need either better arguments in this debate or an alternative solution. I stumbled upon DataStore Development tutorial on GeoTools ( http://docs.geotools.org/latest/tutorials/advanced/datastore.html ) which looks promising, but I'm not quite sure if it's the right thing. I'll try to implement a proof-of-concept to see if I'm able to convert our existing database schema into a new Data Store type recognized by GeoSever. In the meantime I'd love to hear your opinion about the case. Is it common to implement custom DataStores from existing databases or mirroring it in PostGIS is the preferred way? Are there any other options? -- Peter Kovac IMS Programmer MicroStep-MIS peter.ko...@microstep-mis.sk ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Monitor 25 network devices or servers for free with OpManager! OpManager is web-based network management software that monitors network devices and physical & virtual servers, alerts via email & sms for fault. Monitor 25 devices for free with no restriction. Download now http://ad.doubleclick.net/ddm/clk/292181274;119417398;o _______________________________________________ Geoserver-users mailing list Geoserver-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/geoserver-users
