Research And Implementation Of REST-based GIS Web Service

Geospatial information web service has become the development trend of network GIS.However, the traditional “big” GIS web services based on fundamental SOA protocolssuch as SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI are complex to design and maintain, hard to interoperate,and without enough scalability, which largely obstructs the development of GIS Webservices and geo-spatial information sharing and interoperability. In recent years, REST(Representational State Transfer) presented as a Web architectural style, has brought newopportunities for building and deploying GIS web services. The REST-style "light-weight"Web service is a resource-oriented architecture (ROA), which is not only simple to developand easy to use, but also with web-scale scalability, easy to extend and integrate. Therefore,how to apply it to GIS field has become an important and urgent issue.Based on related theory and new technologies, REST-based GIS web service is studied,designed, and implemented in this work, mainly including:(1) REST and REST-Based GIS web service. A brief introduction of the RESTarchitectural style, comparative analysis of the REST web service with the traditionalSOAP-RPC web service about their distinction and respective strengths and weaknesses,and elaborations of the main features and design principles of REST-based GIS webservice, as well as geographic information resource and its representations, are made.(2) Design of REST-Based GIS web service. The architecture of REST-based GIS webservice is proposed, then functional analysis and RESTful (resource-oriented) design ofGIS data service which is most widely used, and optimization analysis of the service,including conditional access, caching, as well as the authentication and authorization, arealso completed.(3) Implementation of REST-Based GIS web service and client. Using.NET technologiessuch as REST WCF and open source GIS components such as OpenLayer, an REST-styleGIS data service and its optimization are implemented, which has functions of map output,spatial dataset retrieval, metadata view of spatial dataset, and feature query, access,creation, update, deletion, etc. In addition，some corresponding service-consuming clients,including a common REST client, Ajax and Silverlight clients, are developed as well.