RFC 13 : SOS support

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Assefa,

While I don't have a vote on this, I am concerned about integrating this 
with mapserver from the point of view that it did not seem to be a 
feature that was useful to the community at large. In fact it seemed to 
be a custom extension that only 1 or 2 people might use, but maybe I 
don't remember that point all that well.

Anyway, my concern is that if it is added to the core mapserver, even 
with #ifdef blocks, think there is some obligation of the developers to 
build and test these features when things change, additional over head 
of documentation, training, beta testing, bug fixes, etc. This all adds 
to the overhead of development and maintenance and slows down the process.

After reading the RFC again and looking at the example URL, it is not 
obvious that this has anything to do directly with serving maps. It 
looks like it is just using the existing OGC infrastructure in the 
mapserver code base. Granted mapserver does queries and this looks like 
it is doing queries, but then so does every database.

Can the sensor observations be rendered as a layer?
Will you be able to style them like other layers?

So I think it should be looked at in terms of the costs versus the 
benefits to the general community. I thought in the original 
presentation of the RFC there was an option to build this as a separate 
project dependent on but separate to mapserver which seems to be a 
better option from my perspective, but maybe I am not understanding the 
full scope of the project correctly.

I do want to say kudos on the RFC, it is very detailed and informative, 
but I'm just not sure it should be included in mapserver.

Best regards,
   -Steve W.


On Feb 23, 2006, at 7:33 PM, Yewondwossen Assefa wrote:

> Is it possible to get comments and votes on this ?
>
> Thanks
>
> Yewondwossen Assefa wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>>   As mentionned a few weeks ago on the list, we were working on  trying
>> to  have an SOS support in Mpaserver using the same concepts  applied 
>> for
>> wms/wfs/wcs.  There is an RFC explaining more on what the intentions
>> are.  Could you please have a look and give feed backs if possiible.
>>
>>  Thanks
>>
>>
>>    http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/development/rfc/ms-rfc-13
>>
>
>
> -- 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------
> Assefa Yewondwossen
> Software Analyst
>
> Email: assefa at dmsolutions.ca
> http://www.dmsolutions.ca/
>
> Phone: (613) 565-5056 (ext 14)
> Fax:   (613) 565-0925
> ----------------------------------------------------------------