Hi, I may be slightly off-topic here because these terms are still fairly new to me, but I agree there can and probably should be better ways to find geoweb services. Certainly things like WFS, WCS and WMS servers should be extremely easy for any search engine to find given they all return easily parseable GetCapabilities documents. It's certainly possible to try a manual search for the same things, but half of the results are about the specification or similar unrelated things. At present these geoweb services seem to be where the WWW was at the begining with manually generated lists of servers and services - however if there was a automatically populated list of services, it'd be much easier to find anything.
The most difficult/resource intensive part would be the spidering of the web to find the GetCapabilities documents in the first place, though any company that already did that could easily generate an index with little extra work. Just my 2 pence. Jonathan 2009/7/23 Sean Gillies <[email protected]> > Stefan, > > You're talking about capabilities documents linking to other capabilities > documents, forming a "web of services"? I think it's probably going to be > more profitable to exploit one of the bigger, more fertile webs (using HTML > or RDF), each of which have proven techniques for making your content > discoverable. > > Sean > > > On Jul 23, 2009, at 1:17 AM, Stefan Keller wrote: > > How about getting better auto-discovery in the Geo-Web? >> How about more special search engines for geospatial webservices? >> >> Approach: Step 1. a focussed crawler is referred to a webservice given >> a (root) geo-website (“see” link) and step 2. the referrer and/or the >> geo-webservice indicates one or more "friends" ("see also" link, [2]). >> In other words, a porter points to the webservices - which is like a >> finding needle in the haystack - and he and the found needles point >> you to other needles! >> >> These are the proposals I've collected so far: >> >> 1. extending robots.txt (see [1]) >> 2. extending links/META tags in HTML ([1]) >> 3. extending (geo-)sitemaps (www.sitemaps.org), and >> 4. extending GetCapabilities >> >> What do you think? >> >> Regards, S. >> >> P.S. I favor 1,2 and 4. And I know I rather should ask geo-metadata >> specialists (which I'll do) - but I think this is the right place to >> start with. >> >> [1] >> http://www.openarchives.org/pipermail/oai-implementers/2006-November/001656.html >> . >> [2] http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/2.0/guidelines-friends.htm . >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Geowanking mailing list >> [email protected] >> http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org >> > > -- > Sean Gillies > Software Engineer > Institute for the Study of the Ancient World > New York University > > > > _______________________________________________ > Geowanking mailing list > [email protected] > http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org >
_______________________________________________ Geowanking mailing list [email protected] http://geowanking.org/mailman/listinfo/geowanking_geowanking.org
