Here's what the current usage profile of the OpenStreetMap API. It's worked extremely well, and been implemented by many clients.
Authentication: HTTP Simple authentication, with login/pw passed within the url (yes, this would more wisely be https or http digest)
http://foo%40example.com:easypass@anonymised.com/api/0.3/node/1
Format:
OSM uses a pretty simple XML format. Mapping to GeoRSS would be straightforward, though would add a bit extra markup (easily gzip'd away)
The OSM db stores "nodes", "segments" (two nodes), "ways" (a collection of segments). segment and ways items would simply contain
references to other items.
RESTful commands... If anything goes wrong with these commands, an appropriate HTTP Response code is returned.
GET
Can pass a bbox to get all objects in that area.
Each of those type of objects can be requested by id
and the complete history of an object can be requested .. this could also be mapped to GeoRSS, as multiple items with the same id, different timestamps
PUT
Simply pass in a chunk of XML, and that object is updated.
DELETE
Just pass in the id
To me, standardization doesn't seem much more complicated than adding the Atom Publishing Protocol on top of WFS Simple
----- Original Message ----
From: Raj Singh <rsingh@anonymised.com>
To: Jo Walsh <jo@anonymised.com>
Cc: Chris Holmes <cholmes@anonymised.com>; Geoserver-devel <geoserver-devel@anonymised.com.sourceforge.net>; wfsbasic.users@anonymised.com; Geotools-Devel list <geotools-devel@lists.sourceforge.net>; mikel.maron@anonymised.com
Sent: Tuesday, November 28, 2006 5:35:11 AM
Subject: Re: [WFSBasic.Users] [Geotools-devel] Versioning WFS-T and protocol extensions
I kind of agree with Chris. To do transactions right moves out of
Simple land. Once you want to update or edit a data set you need to
know all kinds of things about the structure of that data. Not to
mention the other issues. Maybe openstreetmap people could offer some
advice?
---
Raj
On Nov 27, 2006, at 7:15 PM, Jo Walsh wrote:
On Mon, Nov 27, 2006 at 06:37:16PM -0500, Chris Holmes wrote:
I would love it if we could include our ideas on transactions and
versioning and the like in WFS-Simple, but unfortunately I do fear
that
when you get in to transactions, authentication, and versioning
you're
no longer in 'simple' land (indeed I myself might argue against their
place in a simple spec).Then 'Simple' is kind of a misnomer. 'Basic' was the original name,
right? I would have thought being able to write a feature to a web
feature service was a fairly basic operationYou don't need much of the rest of WFS, right, to do Transactions?
Like Filter support and POST queries, GML comprehension and emission,
all these non-Simple things. The question is not "why should it be
WFS-T" but "why shouldn't it also be this other, kind of WFS-like
thing"
