At FOSS4G 2009 I finally went to a code sprint, partly as a form of meditation, and partly to see if I had any developer chops left. Well the jury is still out on that, but it was relaxing, and what came out of it was the first release of SimpleWFS.

SimpleWFS is a 100% Java servlet that serves any data in PostGIS via the WFS Simple API. Output formats supported are BXFS and KML, among others (GML and Atom coming soon). My hope is that SimpleWFS can be up and running in under a half hour, exponentially increasing the ease of getting more spatial data on the web.

Please try it out and help improve it.

After the untimely demise last year of my sandbox server at MIT, I haven’t been good at advertising (or even doing) technology experiments. I’m finally getting my act together now, and have a few interesting things out on the Interwebs:

Coordinate projection service is a useful little thing that also is a nice sample of GeoRSS-GML

US Cities lets you query a database of US cities by name or bounding box, and returns the results in either GeoAtom (Atom + GeoRSS) or BXFS. It’s also OpenSearch enabled, so you can add it as a search engine type in Firefox.

In the OGC meetings last week WFS Simple was presented to the membership as a part of the “OWS4 GeoDSS Mass Market (formerly GeoRSS) IPR” (note this link will only work for OGC members for a few more days). It was approved as a discussion paper, which is a document that’s worth making public, but is not necessarily an “official” position of the OGC (as a Best Practices paper is).

There were two major areas of discussion at the meeting. One was around whether WFS Simple should harmonize with WFS and become the most basic WFS implementation. The other was related to Basic XML Feature Schema (BXFS) as the default output schema for WFS Simple. These are actually related items as the biggest problem with rolling WFS Simple into WFS would be the issue of having GML as a required output format.

Although at first blush it sounds nice to bring this work into an existing service, I agree with the opinions that it should stay separate. GML as a required output format is too important of a foundation of WFS to tinker with. Therefore I propose maintaining the separation and pursuing the following work items leading to a 1.0 specification.

1. keep WFS Simple focussed on being the generic geospatial data query language for mainstream web data formats like Atom+GeoRSS, KML, etc.

2. Componentize the design of the service, so that this is not really one service, but a simple, clear way to design services focussed on a particular data type like Atom+GeoRSS by adding or removing a parameter or two.

3. Re-emphasize the separation from WFS by moving towards a 1.0 specification with a new name, Geodata Query Service