Book Image

GeoServer Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

By : Stefano Iacovella
Book Image

GeoServer Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

By: Stefano Iacovella

Overview of this book

GeoServer is an opensource server written in Java that allows users to share, process, and edit geospatial data. This book will guide you through the new features and improvements of GeoServer and will help you get started with it. GeoServer Beginner's Guide gives you the impetus to build custom maps using your data without the need for costly commercial software licenses and restrictions. Even if you do not have prior GIS knowledge, you will be able to make interactive maps after reading this book. You will install GeoServer, access your data from a database, and apply style points, lines, polygons, and labels to impress site visitors with real-time maps. Then you follow a step-by-step guide that installs GeoServer in minutes. You will explore the web-based administrative interface to connect to backend data stores such as PostGIS, and Oracle. Going ahead, you can display your data on web-based interactive maps, use style lines, points, polygons, and embed images to visualize this data for your web visitors. You will walk away from this book with a working application ready for production. After reading GeoServer Beginner's Guide, you will be able to build beautiful custom maps on your website using your geospatial data.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Delivering vector data


If a user needs to get your vector data, for example the USA railroads, he can use the Web Feature Service (WFS) protocol. It is a standard protocol defined by OGC that refers to the sending and receiving of geospatial data through HTTP.

When delivering data, the most important thing to define is the data format. Vector data is usually stored in a binary format--think of a shapefile or a PostGIS table--but for practical purposes, we need a more standard approach. Indeed, WFS encodes and transfers information in Geography Markup Language (GML) based on XML.

There exists a few versions of WFS and GML. The current GeoServer release supports the 1.0.0, 1.1.0, and 2.0.0 WFS versions.

Note

You can find the full reference for WFS and GML at the OGC repository at http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/is; look for OpenGIS Geography Markup Language (GML) Encoding Standard and OpenGIS Web Feature Service (WFS) Implementation Specification.

WFS defines a set of operations that a...