Designing the big picture

Designing the big picture

After literature review and further research and gathering a lot of information about state-of-the-art technology and paradigms, I designed a bigger concept of a possible, full-fledged WebGIS that is more than capable to support the data-related and computational needs of the research of the SMART aquifer characterisation program. after writing it down, we already got a paper to submit to the GI_Forum Geoinformatics conference.

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SMART Portal archtitecture concept

As shown in the picture, the whole portal / WebGIS is based on standardised interfaces, mainly the OGC geo-spatial web services. as a requirement from the New Zealand Ministry of Science and Innovation all software produced (and used) should be Open Source, the main building blocks for the portal will be tested and evaluated in the prototype, I am going to develop:

• PostGres/PostGis - data storage, spatial database
• Geoserver - for WMS and WFS (subsequently WCS, too)
• OpenLayers as web mapping client
• 52North SOS Server, customise DAO backend to serve data from an existing legacy DB
• Thredds server to serve netCDF coverage data
• X3D as 3D file format to display 3D geological model in the browser
• Geonetwork - CSW, metadata, to connect to upstream NZ spatial data infrastructure