Dear qgis developer, here are my two cent from the point of view of a GRASS GIS, VTK and wps-grass-bridge developer :
IMHO most of these features which are discussed here are covered by the Web Processing Service http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/wps. WPS is an OGC standard for a generic interface description to run processes from different software packages/libraries as web service. The following GIS software/libraries are already available as web processing services: ArcGIS via 52North WPS SEXTANTE via 52North WPS GRASS GIS via 52North WPS, PyWPS and ZOO WPS using the wps-grass-bridge A lot of work has been done to integrate these GIS packages as web processing service back-ends, so you can use them out of the box and avoid redundant implementations of the same idea. The support of the OGC WPS standard in QGIS will allow you to: - use open standards for interface descriptions - Integrate the existing WPS server and there processes (~400?) as algorithms into QGIS - chain/orchestrate WPS processes from different back-ends - directly integrate WFS and WCS sources as inputs without the need of local storage - Working with QGIS on a silent and long running computer in the office while the processing is done on a heavy and fast server in the basement A special feature: The processing can be done in the cloud using QGIS as a client: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jg2pb_Xjq8Y QGIS will be completely independent from minor or major changes in the WPS back-ends (new GRASS GIS or SEXTANE versions, ... ) which is IMHO a huge advantage. I would suggest to implement an outstanding WPS client for QGIS and to help others to integrate more GIS software and libraries as back-ends in existing open source WPS server. Horst Düster and i have implemented a nice prototype which can be seen in action here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCnax9w1bCs&feature=related Best regards Soeren _______________________________________________ Qgis-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer
