RFC 13 : SOS support

[Yewondwossen Assefa]

Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> 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,

Frank,

  I am going to update the RFC to include producing automatic testings 
to  fit into the msautotest structure.

  Thanks for your feed back and support.

Best Regards,


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Assefa Yewondwossen
Software Analyst

Email: assefa at dmsolutions.ca
http://www.dmsolutions.ca/

Phone: (613) 565-5056 (ext 14)
Fax:   (613) 565-0925
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