riparias/gbif-alert

Provide an external GIS API

Closed this issue · 6 comments

niconoe commented

Feature request by @filipmahieu (see also mail from Oct 6, 2021):

make the data available from aggregated webapp in their own tool using protocols such as WFS, WMS, ...

Preliminary answer: good idea, but it's probably not the highest priority so we'll tackle that a bit later, and we'll also have to discuss and prioritize the specifics: what data is most needed (occurrences?) / in which format / available filtering options...

niconoe commented

Hi @filipmahieu: I am now getting back to this feature. Can you tell me a bit more about your precise use case? Thinks like:

  • what kind of data is most needed (occurrences?)
  • in which format?
  • available filtering options?
filipmahieu commented

We have

  • a tool that downloads every night data from WFS-webservices and so provides us up-to-data data on SQL-Server, which we then can read in QGis and othter programs.
  • QGis is also able to read WFS-webservices, but direct reading WFS's is not recommended, however used in specific cases.

A WFS (2.0) of the occurences would be nice and is most asked
Also a WMS could be usefull, more for other users (that cannot download the WFS-data overnight) then us

WFS/WMS is in gis-programs a standard format, described on https://www.ogc.org/standard/wfs/ and https://www.ogc.org/standard/wms

Filtering options are not asked, hence we always will want all the data and can filter the SQL-Server-data.

Good to know: WFS OGC-API Features is the promissing successor of WFS but not all systems support OGC-API Features (QGis does, our overnight-download-system doesn't).

niconoe commented

Thanks for the info, @filipmahieu!

I've set-up an experimental WFS server for observations, maybe you can try it and see if it fulfills your needs?

It's currently only available on the development site of RIPARIAS, so it serves the data visible from https://dev-alert.riparias.be/

You can access it at the https://dev-alert.riparias.be/api/wfs/observations URL, no authentication needed.

filipmahieu commented

Thanks already!

I can access it. I'll check out with Koen Van Roeyen and let you know.

I see the data is in (coördinate system) CRS EPSG:3857, not in the Belgian Lambert 72 (EPSG:31370). This not really a problem (systems accept it, transform it themselves - with little extra load), but not the standard in Flanders (all Flanders-made data is I think supposed to be distributed in EPSG:31370).

niconoe commented

Thanks for the quick feedback, @filipmahieu!

Well, we technically can provide other CRS without too much trouble, but I initially started with just EPSG:3857 for the following reasons:

  • That's what we use internally, so that allows us to avoid (costly) on-the-fly reprojections on our servers (which is already a bit overloaded at the moment)
  • You may have noticed that we've now made this tool (GBIF Alert) reusable in other contexts than just RIPARIAS. Therefore, it makes more sense to provide globally common CRSes such as WGS84 and EPSG:3857 than the more specific Belgian Lambert 72. If we decide to add more options, I'd like to at least keep that configurable (per instance/website) by the administrators.

Please keep us posted of your experiments with it!

niconoe commented

I think we can close this and open new issues for more specific requests!