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.kovac@anonymised.com