Hi all!
0) I'm trying to figure out how best to organize all of our layers so
that they are not just sitting in a file hierarchy (which is becoming
unmanageable). Can anyone suggest good references on how to go about
structuring/setting up a database (PostgreSQL + PostGIS) to do this?
I'm pretty sure that other's have thought hard about this problem, so I
don't want to re-invent the wheel here. What sorts of things does one
need to think about? Tables with meta-data linking to tables with
actual layers? One big database versus separate databases for different
feature types? Etc.
1) I really need to be able to search the meta-data. I'm thinking here
of the info entered into GeoServers' Feature Type Editor, in particular
the Keywords and Abstract. It is not clear to me whether such info can
be stored in PostGreSQL, or is simply stored in a file associated with
Geoserver. Or phrased differently, I'm not seeing how Geoserver will
allow me to search for layers with particular keywords, which is sort of
the whole point behind setting up this kind of system.
2) Finally, I also want to ask questions like "Find all layers that
intersect this bounding box". While I believe this can be done with
PostGIS, one concern is that I want the final system to be usable by
non-techies (i.e., people who don't know SQL). Are there any "nice"
ways to do this sort of thing?
Thanks!
Craig
--
CW-405 Biological Sciences Blding
University of Alberta
Edmonton AB
T6G 2E9
Phone: 780-492-1289
Fax: 780-492-9234
Thanks for this!
After posting my message, I finally stumbled across GeoNetwork:
http://193.43.36.138/
With examples:
http://vam.wfp.org/geonetwork/srv/en/main.home
http://www.fao.org/geonetwork/srv/en/main.home
From my playing around with it, it seems to have an acceptable
level-of-use difficulty.
I think I read somewhere that people were thinking of merging GeoNetwork
with GeoServer. That would REALLY ROCK!!
Cheers!
Craig
On Fri, 2006-05-26 at 10:09 +0700, Brent Owens wrote:
Hi Craig
0) Just recently we set up a couple of databases, each one housing many
tables all related to a similar dataset. Of of the databases was all
TIGER data, well called it 'tiger2005', and another database was all
GNIS data, we called it 'gnis'. We could have put it all in one
database, but it seemed to make more sense to separate them. We didn't
use any meta-data. All of the active tables we loaded as feature types
into GeoServer, and let it handle the meta data.
1),2) To get a list of all layers on your server, just issue a
getCapabilities request:
http://sigma.openplans.org:8080/geoserver/wfs?request=capabilities
(try putting that in a web browser, it will give you the results from
one of our demo pages)
This will return a capabilities document with all the layers present,
and the bounding box containing them. So from there, you can grab all
the meta information you need from the layers, and intersect the layers
with their bounding box
Hope that helps,
Brent Owens
(The Open Planning Project)
Craig Aumann wrote:
> Hi all!
>
> 0) I'm trying to figure out how best to organize all of our layers so
> that they are not just sitting in a file hierarchy (which is becoming
> unmanageable). Can anyone suggest good references on how to go about
> structuring/setting up a database (PostgreSQL + PostGIS) to do this?
> I'm pretty sure that other's have thought hard about this problem, so I
> don't want to re-invent the wheel here. What sorts of things does one
> need to think about? Tables with meta-data linking to tables with
> actual layers? One big database versus separate databases for different
> feature types? Etc.
>
> 1) I really need to be able to search the meta-data. I'm thinking here
> of the info entered into GeoServers' Feature Type Editor, in particular
> the Keywords and Abstract. It is not clear to me whether such info can
> be stored in PostGreSQL, or is simply stored in a file associated with
> Geoserver. Or phrased differently, I'm not seeing how Geoserver will
> allow me to search for layers with particular keywords, which is sort of
> the whole point behind setting up this kind of system.
>
> 2) Finally, I also want to ask questions like "Find all layers that
> intersect this bounding box". While I believe this can be done with
> PostGIS, one concern is that I want the final system to be usable by
> non-techies (i.e., people who don't know SQL). Are there any "nice"
> ways to do this sort of thing?
>
>
> Thanks!
> Craig
>
>
>
>
--
CW-405 Biological Sciences Blding
University of Alberta
Edmonton AB
T6G 2E9
Phone: 780-492-1289
Fax: 780-492-9234