Underlying Technology
GeoConnections provided funding support for the user needs assessment and application development for FRImap. One of the funding requirements for GeoConnections was that the application needed to be compliant with the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure (CGDI). Due to pricey licensing costs for ESRI ArcGIS Server along with the need for future flexibility, our technical steering committee decided to embark on a new adventure and utilize open source components for the development of the FRImap framework.
The FRImap framework uses the following open source components: PostGRE, GeoServer, and GeoTools. GeoTools is basically an open source Java library that provides tools for geospatial data and the manipulation of geospatial data. This toolkit is built compliant with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and implements OGC specifications as they are developed.
GeoServer is a Java-based open source geospatial software server that allows users to share and edit data. GeoServer is also OGD compliant and is built on GeoTools which was described above. FRImap utilizes both Web Feature Services and Web Mapping Services. GeoServer implements the Web Mapping Services (creates maps as a variety of outputs) and conforms the Web Feature Services (allows the sharing and editing of the geospatial data used to generate the maps).
PostgreSQL (open source object-relational database system) and POSTGIS (adds support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL object-relational database) is used to store new spatial layers that are created by users.
Some of the “behind the scenes” closed source components include ESRI ArcSDE which stores the geospatial data within an Oracle database.
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