Geoweb services

Data streams

Spatial data services are a specialised form of web services and an essential component of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI). They are indispensable in business and administration and an essential part of IT infrastructures. The great benefit of standardised spatial data services is the independence of data provision for different software and operating systems on different end devices (PC, tablet, smartphone, ...).

In software development for web applications, the three-tier model distinguishes between the client, the web server and the underlying data. Spatial data infrastructures follow this principle, whose basic idea is to provide the main functionality and computationally intensive processes via the web server layer and to keep the client's technology as lean as possible. The data exchange is based on SOAP or REST protcols.

INSPIRE is an EU directive that provides the legal background for the development of spatial data infrastructures. For the implementation of a GDI, the standards defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), among others for spatial data and spatial data services, are used for spatial information processing. Standardisation pursues the goal of interoperability, i.e. the cooperation of different systems, techniques or organisations. The OGC standardisations include a variety of spatial web services, the so-called geodata services or OpenGIS web services. Among them are