USING OGC WxS TO BUILD WEB GAZETTEER: A CASE STUDY OF CAMBODIAN GEOGRAPHIC PLACE NAMES DATABASE

摘要

The OpenGIS Consortium offers open computing standards for geo-processing, among which the WxS series address the interoperability problems between spatial Web services. This study conducted the Cambodian gazetteer prototype system on the basis of Web Map Service (WMS) and Web Feature Service (WFS) and took the full advantage provided by those open GIS standards. The development of the gazetteer service was entirely based on an open source GIS solution on Linux platform. The PostGIS/PostgreSQL was used as a backend spatial database to manage all geographic datasets - the village-level place names database and the 1:100,000 topographic maps. The OGC WMS- compliant Minnesota Mapserver serves these datasets on the Web in raster map format, while the Geoserver that fully implements WFS 1.0.0 interface helps the name-to-place query, returning the place geometry features in GML format. What is more, one additional XSLT (XSL Transformation) processor – Apache Xalan was deployed to convert GML to SVG. Thus, end users can obtain an impressive map by typing a place name. The success of developing the gazetteer system shows that the open source GIS software with a strong momentum are able to be viable alternatives to proprietary products. The prototype system in this study supports rapid dissemination of spatial information on Internet and extension of system scale on Intranet, as it is an open system based on OGC WxS series and Open Source GIS Software. Meanwhile, we observed that the success of applying WFS interface raised as well the issue of the exposure of the valuable spatial data on the web. Therefore, it is necessary to explore the XML security on spatial web service in the future.