RFC 13 : SOS support

[Frank Warmerdam]

Stephen Woodbridge wrote:
> 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.

Steve,

I can see your concern, but to me the SOS support seems closely analygous
to the WFS support.  It doesn't produce a map, but it does provide another
interface to the underlying data objects, like WFS.  I see implementing this
as part of a commitment within MapServer to implement OGC services that make
sense in the context of MapServer.

Because of that, I'm "+1".

I would appreciate some discussion of what auto-testing is planned for the
SOS feature.  I think this is especially important since most developers will
not be familiar with SOS support and how to test it manually.

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent