[R-sig-Geo] WMS, WFS, WCS an WPS for R

[Edzer Pebesma]

Interesting question!

Of course, all these are services, and R is not typically a service or a 
client, but rather an environment to do statistical computing. Reading 
and writing can, as mentioned, be done to some extent through OGR (WFS, 
e.g. by writing gml) and GDAL (WCS, reading). Note that gml has many 
versions, and the more recent ones are typically monsters of complexity; 
OSGEO seems to support mainly older versions or subsets for specific 
application areas. WMS is more something of an output, useful for those 
who want to see the map rather than have the data.

We're currently working in the intamap project (http://www.intamap.org) 
to provide R interpolation facilities through a web processing standard, 
which basically means GIS (or any other) processing through an OGC 
complient web service (WPS, as opposed to e.g. SOAP). Here, R does the 
back end work, and the WPS front-end takes care of input (an O&M, 
observations and measurements document, xml) and output (gml for 
geometry, UncertML for probability distributions). If someone is 
interested in testing this, please let me know.

Other OGC services to check out are those in the SWE area: SOS, SPS, 
SAS, this list is growing faster than an adult can learn remembering 
abbreviations.
--
Edzer


Roger Bivand wrote:
> On Sat, 22 Nov 2008, Barry Rowlingson wrote:
>
>> 2008/11/22 Hisaji ONO <hi_ono2001 at ybb.ne.jp>:
>>> Hello.
>>>
>>>  There are lots of services of OGC(Open Geospatial
>>> Consortium:http://www.opengeospatial.org/)'s standard
>>> based Geo-Web ervices incluing WMS(Web Map Service),
>>> WFS(Web Feature Service), WCS(Web Coverage Service) and
>>> WPS(Web Processing Service) all over the world.
>>>
>>>  Does anyone try to use these services from R?
>>
>> Any access to WMS and WFS would probably be best done using GDAL and
>> OGR via the rgdal package.... Let's see...
>>
>> GDAL has a WMS driver, but it seems you do have to create a 'local
>> service description' file. www.gdal.org seems down at the moment, so
>> here's a google cache link:
>>
>> http://216.239.59.132/search?q=cache:21OOLtr9yj0J:www.gdal.org/frmt_wms.html+gdal+wms&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=uk 
>>
>>
>> For WFS, there's some recent discussion on the gdal-dev list:
>>
>> http://www.nabble.com/OGR-WFS-driver-td20485363.html
>>
>> so it might be coming soon. Can you wait?
>>
>> To do WFS from scratch in R is probably going to need XML parsing,
>> and then it'll probably also need OGR too unless you want to hand-code
>> understanding the returned GML...
>
> Yes, so OGR needs to be built against the Xerces libraries. I agree 
> that WMS and WFS are best handled by using work that is already going 
> on in the OSGeo community. An example of R in a a WPS setting is:
>
> Katharina Henneböhl, Edzer Pebesma:
> Providing R functionality through the OGC Web Processing Service
>
> given at useR! 2008 in Dortmund in August - there is an abstract on 
> the conference website. I think that their trial site may be ready 
> before long, together with the underlying software.
>
> Roger
>
>>
>> Barry
>>
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>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-sig-geo
>>
>
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-- 
Edzer Pebesma
Institute for Geoinformatics (ifgi), University of Münster
Weseler Straße 253, 48151 Münster, Germany. Phone: +49 251
8333081, Fax: +49 251 8339763 http://ifgi.uni-muenster.de/
http://www.springer.com/978-0-387-78170-9 e.pebesma at wwu.de