GeoServer 1.4-M2-WCS (WCS) review

GeoServer project connects your information to the Geospatial Web

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Chris Holmes

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GeoServer project connects your information to the Geospatial Web. With GeoServer, you can publish and edit data using open standards. Your information is made available in a large variety of formats as maps/images or actual geospatial data.

GeoServer's transactional capabilities offer robust support for shared editing. It supports WFS-T and WMS open protocols from the OGC to produce JPEG, PNG, SVG, KML/KMZ, GML, PDF, Shapefiles, and more. It is built on the GeoTools2 Java GIS toolkit.

Configuration:

The WCS and WMS raster support is fully configurable from the web admin tool. If you've learned how to use the web admin tool, then go to it and look for coverage stuff. Configure your layers as you do for the non-coverage stuff, but they will be available as WCS coverages as well as WMS layers.

First of all you have to configure your Server capabilities. In the Config > Server section you can find several fields that allow you to optimize the JAI memory configuration:

1. JAI mem capacity expressed in bytes represents the amount of available memory for JAI operations. We suggest to use the default amount, more advices will come later.
2. JAI mem threshold is the percentage at which the Tile cache starts flushing tiles.
3. JAI cache recycling if checked allows JAI to re-use alredy loaded tiles (vital capabilty for perfomances).

At this point the WCS can be configured and feed with your data.

In the Config > Data > CoveragePlugins you can find the list of installed plugins. A plugin represents the raster format that GeoServer is able to read/write. With the default distribution the supported file formats are:

GRIB edition 1
GeoTiff
WorldImages: PNG, JPG, TIFF, GIF with a world file attached
ArcGrid: ASCII files
GTOPO 30: DEM files
ImageMosaic: a mosaic of several images with world file or geotiff files. It is still quite experimental but it is showing good perfomances.

What's New in This Release:
While the 0.2 release was a mere prototype, this work is the result of many optimizations at the geotools level, with scalable data reading for arcgrid, geotiff, gtopo30, image mosaics and pyramids, and georeferenced PNG, JPEG, and TIFFs.