computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, ...

, GeoServer is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

server written in

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

that allows users to share, process and edit

geospatial data Geographic data and information is defined in the ISO/TC 211 series of standards as data and information having an implicit or explicit association with a location relative to Earth (a geographic location or geographic position). It is also cal ...

. Designed for interoperability, it publishes data from any major spatial data source using

open standard An open standard is a standard that is openly accessible and usable by anyone. It is also a prerequisite to use open license, non-discrimination and extensibility. Typically, anybody can participate in the development. There is no single definitio ...

s. GeoServer has evolved to become an easy method of connecting existing information to

virtual globe A virtual globe is a three-dimensional (3D) software model or representation of Earth or another world. A virtual globe provides the user with the ability to freely move around in the virtual environment by changing the viewing angle and positio ...

s such as Google Earth and

NASA World Wind NASA WorldWind is an open-source (released under the NOSA license and the Apache 2.0 license) virtual globe. According to the website (https://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/), "WorldWind is an open source virtual globe API. WorldWind allow ...

as well as to web-based maps such as

OpenLayers OpenLayers is an open-source (provided under the 2-clause BSD License) JavaScript library for displaying map data in web browsers as slippy maps. It provides an API for building rich web-based geographic applications similar to Google Maps and ...

, Leaflet,

Google Maps Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panorama, interactive panoramic views of streets (Google Street View, Street View ...

and Bing Maps. GeoServer functions as the

reference implementation In the software development process, a reference implementation (or, less frequently, sample implementation or model implementation) is a program that implements all requirements from a corresponding specification. The reference implementation ...

of the

Open Geospatial Consortium The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), an international voluntary consensus standards organization for geospatial content and location-based services, sensor web and Internet of Things, GIS data processing and data sharing. It originated in 199 ...

Web Feature Service In computing, the Open Geospatial Consortium Web Feature Service (WFS) Interface Standard provides an interface allowing requests for geographical features across the web using platform-independent calls. One can think of geographical features as ...

standard, and also implements the

Web Map Service A Web Map Service (WMS) is a standard protocol developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium in 1999 for serving georeferenced map images over the Internet. These images are typically produced by a map server from data provided by a GIS database. ...

, Web Coverage Service and Web Processing Service specifications.

Goals

GeoServer aims to operate as a node within a free and open Spatial Data Infrastructure. Just as the Apache HTTP Server has offered a free and open web server to publish

HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...

, GeoServer aims to do the same for geospatial data.

Features

GeoServer reads a variety of data formats, including: *

PostGIS PostGIS ( ) is an open source software program that adds support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL object-relational database. PostGIS follows the Simple Features for SQL specification from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). Technica ...

* Oracle Spatial *

ArcSDE ArcSDE (''SDE'' for ''Spatial Database Engine'') is a server-software sub-system (produced and marketed by Esri) that aims to enable the usage of Relational Database Management Systems for spatial data. The spatial data may then be used as part of ...

IBM Db2 Db2 is a family of data management products, including database servers, developed by IBM. It initially supported the relational model, but was extended to support object–relational features and non-relational structures like JSON and ...

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database ...

MongoDB MongoDB is a source-available cross-platform document-oriented database program. Classified as a NoSQL database program, MongoDB uses JSON-like documents with optional schemas. MongoDB is developed by MongoDB Inc. and licensed under the Ser ...

Apache Solr Solr (pronounced "solar") is an open-source enterprise-search platform, written in Java. Its major features include full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, real-time indexing, dynamic clustering, database integration, NoSQL features ...

Shapefile The shapefile format is a geospatial vector data format for geographic information system (GIS) software. It is developed and regulated by Esri as a mostly open specification for data interoperability among Esri and other GIS software products ...

s *

GeoTIFF GeoTIFF is a public domain metadata standard which allows georeferencing information to be embedded within a TIFF file. The potential additional information includes map projection, coordinate systems, ellipsoids, datums, and everything else nece ...

GTOPO30 GTOPO30 is a digital elevation model for the world, developed by United States Geological Survey (USGS). It has a 30-arc second resolution (approximately 1 km), and is split into 33 tiles stored in the USGS DEM file format. According to DTED ...

* ECW,

MrSID MrSID (pronounced Mister Sid) is an acronym that stands for ''multiresolution seamless image database''. It is a file format (filename extension ''.sid'') developed and patented by LizardTech (in October 2018 absorbed into Extensis) for encoding o ...

JPEG2000 JPEG 2000 (JP2) is an image compression standard and coding system. It was developed from 1997 to 2000 by a Joint Photographic Experts Group committee chaired by Touradj Ebrahimi (later the JPEG president), with the intention of superseding thei ...

Through standard protocols it produces KML, GML, Shapefile,

GeoRSS GeoRSS is a specification for encoding location as part of a Web feed. ''(Web feeds are used to describe feeds ("channels") of content, such as news articles, Audio blogs, video blogs and text blog entries. These web feeds are rendered by progra ...

PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

GeoJSON GeoJSON is an open standard format designed for representing simple geographical features, along with their non-spatial attributes. It is based on the JSON format. The features include points (therefore addresses and locations), line strings ( ...

JPEG JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and im ...

GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , see pronunciation) is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on 15 June 1987. ...

SVG Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML-based vector image format for defining two-dimensional graphics, having support for interactivity and animation. The SVG specification is an open standard developed by the World Wide Web Consortium sinc ...

, PNG and more. In addition, one can edit data via the WFS transactional profile (WFS-T). GeoServer includes an integrated

client for previewing data layers. GeoServer additionally supports efficient publishing of geospatial data to Google Earth through the use of network links, using KML. Advanced features for Google Earth output include templates for customized pop-ups, time and height visualizations, and "super-overlays". GeoServer relies on GeoTools, a

GIS A geographic information system (GIS) is a type of database containing geographic data (that is, descriptions of phenomena for which location is relevant), combined with software tools for managing, analyzing, and visualizing those data. In a ...

library.

Usage

* MassGIS (Massachusetts state GIS) * MACRIS Maps (Massachusetts Historical Commission) *

TriMet TriMet, formally known as the Tri-County Metropolitan Transportation District of Oregon, is a public agency that operates public transport, mass transit in a Transportation in Portland, Oregon, region that spans most of the Portland metropolit ...

(Transit agency for Portland, Oregon) *

Ordnance Survey Ordnance Survey (OS) is the national mapping agency for Great Britain. The agency's name indicates its original military purpose (see ordnance and surveying), which was to map Scotland in the wake of the Jacobite rising of 1745. There was ...

(National Mapping Agency of the UK) *

Institut Géographique National An institute is an organisational body created for a certain purpose. They are often research organisations (research institutes) created to do research on specific topics, or can also be a professional body. In some countries, institutes can ...

(National Mapping Agency of France) *

GBIF The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is an international organisation that focuses on making scientific data on biodiversity available via the Internet using web services. The data are provided by many institutions from around th ...

(Global Biodiversity Information Facility) *

World Bank The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans and grants to the governments of low- and middle-income countries for the purpose of pursuing capital projects. The World Bank is the collective name for the Inte ...

Global Earthquake Model The Global Earthquake Model (GEM) is a public–private partnership initiated in 2006 by the Global Science Forum of the OECD to develop global, open-source software, open-source risk assessment software and tools. With committed backing from acad ...

* GMOS (Global Mercury Observation System) *

FAO The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)french: link=no, Organisation des Nations unies pour l'alimentation et l'agriculture; it, Organizzazione delle Nazioni Unite per l'Alimentazione e l'Agricoltura is an intern ...

(Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) *

New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications The New York City Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI), formerly known as the Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT), is the department of the government of New York City that "over awthe City's use of existing an ...

* TeamSurv * ITU (International Telecommunication Union)

Architecture

GeoServer uses the

Spring Framework The Spring Framework is an application framework and inversion of control container for the Java platform. The framework's core features can be used by any Java application, but there are extensions for building web applications on top of the J ...

, providing a request dispatch architecture for modules implementing OGC services. The web administration application uses wicket, allowing extensions to contribute additional configuration screens. The application provides a REST API implemented using the spring-mvc-framework. GeoServer is a web application, supporting any common

servlet container A web container (also known as a servlet container; and compare "webcontainer" ) is the component of a web server that interacts with Jakarta Servlets. A web container is responsible for managing the lifecycle of servlets, mapping a URL to a pa ...

(a standalone distribution is available with the

Jetty (web server) Eclipse Jetty is a Java web server and Java Servlet container. While web servers are usually associated with serving documents to people, Jetty is now often used for machine to machine communications, usually within larger software frameworks. Je ...

as an embedded server). GeoWebCache, a Java-based caching component similar to TileCache, is bundled with GeoServer, but available separately. Similarly, GeoServer packages GeoTools as a Java library, but it is also available separately. GeoServer is a longstanding application and has undergone several architectural changes. GeoServer 1.0 was built around the STRUTS framework, with the migration to Spring and Wicket taking place for GeoServer 2.0. Early versions of the REST API used restlet before migration to spring-mvc-framework.

References

External links