Research Of Meteorological Spatial Information Service Platform Based On REST Architecture

In an era of rapid growth of meteorology monitoring methods and sensor technology, the observation density of atmosphere increased both spatially and temporally. The huge amount of data that collected by those sensors requires being stored, processed and shared efficiently in order to well support the forecast and research. WebGIS, a combination of GIS with latest web technology can provide great spatial data processing, data sharing and visualization ability, which all can improve the capability of meteorology data system and support people's work in atmosphere research. So, WebGIS technology is widely applied to meteorology system both in China and other countries. Now, WebGIS is evolving into a way that called service oriented WebGIS which client has strong capability and the client connects with the server using predefined interface that the server exposed. This article analyzes the special requirement of meteorology service and point out that RESTful (Representative State Transfer) service is better than other service in meteorology spatial information service WebGIS implementation. However, current research is based on existing commercial WebGIS platforms or open source REST frameworks in which only a subset of the restriction of REST is implemented and less optimization is performance for the meteorology data. Less research has been done in designing a well RESTful framework used for meteorology spatial information service.Facing the deficiency of current research, this article analyzes the REST architecture and the WebGIS technology theoretically and practically. Based on this analysis, this article designed a well restful meteorology spatial information service system using IIS and ASP.NET frameworks. This system was divided into two separated modules, one is data processing module and the other is service module. Then this article applied this system in a tropical cyclone system. The implementation of this system proves that RESTful service can improve the performance and user experience of meteorology spatial information service WebGIS. The research of this article also provides practical experience in RESTful geospatial service that may useful for other researchers and practitioners who plan to make use of this architecture.