Thoughts on the ESRI Developer Summit and OGC in ArcGIS Server

http://www.lizardtech.com/blog/2008/thoughts-on-the-esri-developer-summit-and-ogc-in-arcgis-server/

The Open Geospatial Consortium (of which both ESRI and LizardTech are members) exists to publish freely available specifications that allow geospatial applications to talk to each other. The three most commonly used OGC specifications are:

• Web Map Service (WMS) for serving custom maps into web pages. Typically these are small JPEG image “tiles” that make up your map.
• Web Feature Service (WFS) for serving features (vector data like roads, borders, pizza shops) from your dataset into another geospatial application that can interact with them at much more controlled level than a read-only map. Think of WFS is as serving GML over HTTP. An OGC extension for this is WFS-T (T for “transactions”) which allows remote editing of data.
• Web Coverage Service (WCS). Like WMS, this provides a means of accessing raster data. However, here the service is optimized for sending to another geospatial application, rather than a simple web service.

At 9.3, there is significant support for all of these.

WMS

ArcGIS Server’s WMS support is extended to the current version 1.3 including support for Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD). SLDs are part of the WMS specification and allow customized symbology for features. The demonstration here included an OpenLayers web page client rendering a map (with user-selected symbology) served from ArcGIS Server via WMS. That was pretty good, but really, only a marginal improvement.

WFS

The previous 9.2 Data Interoperability extension will continue to provide WFS support to the Desktop Clients. However, at 9.3, “Simple Features” support comes out of the box (without the extra license). On the server side, 9.3 includes a WFS server and if your back-end store is SDE then this includes WFS-T support. What that means is that if you use SDE, non-ESRI clients (who speak WFS) can edit your geodatabase. Stop for a minute and think about that.
The demonstration here showed again the Open Layers client. This time it accessed the parcel data stored in ArcGIS Server via WFS. It corrected some of the parcel boundaries and this was reflected in the same GDB accessed via ArcMap. Frankly, I was pretty impressed.

WCS

WCS support is totally new in 9.3. The demonstration of server support showed the Open Layers client rendering a 4-banded Modis image served from ArcGIS Server via WCS. More interesting to me was the client demo where ArcMap read a dataset via WCS from ICDES and did some sort of raster-based geo-processing on it (I can’t remember exactly what it was). Very, very cool.

Whether or not you believe “What’s good for the country is good for General Motors, and vice versa,” ESRI’s support for this sort of interoperability can only be seen as good news for GIS and for ESRI.