[TinyOWS-users] Motion: FOSS4G WFS magician competition

[Rahkonen Jukka]

Hi,

I would love to meet a person or group who could contigure all these
- GeoServer
- deegree
- MapServer and
- TinyOWS
to deliver the same datasets through WFS, and then show with some Open
Source desktop client, that it is possible to build queries with both
attribute and spatial filters and request features from all these
services so that the returning data get correctly parsed and that
finally there would be four identical map layers with identical
attributes on the screen. I have found that I am not talented enough for
that and I'll give in.

As a first step I suggest that GeoServer, deegree, MapServer and TinyOWS
developer teams would try to agree on some test datasets and try to keep
them available from their demo servers so that the WFS server and client
developers could use them for evaluating interoperability. Datasets do
not need to be big so it should not be especially hard or expensive
thing to do. Actually there are already at least these online, but all
with different datasets:
http://www2.dmsolutions.ca/cgi-bin/mswfs_gmap?SERVICE=WFS&VERSION=1.0.0&
REQUEST=GetCapabilities
http://demo.deegree.org/deegree-wfs/services?SERVICE=WFS&VERSION=1.0.0&R
EQUEST=GetCapabilities
http://sigma.openplans.org:8080/geoserver/wfs?SERVICE=WFS&VERSION=1.0.0&
REQUEST=GetCapabilities

Or perhaps the competition should be aimed for the desktop GIS teams?
Usually there is no problem in getting data out from the WFS services
with wget or browser, but the real clients tend to work against only (or
at most) one WFS server model.  Anyway, the same data available from
different WFS servers would be extremely important even then.

-Jukka Rahkonen-