6 Using GeoServer software to serve OneGeology web services
GeoServer is an free and open sourced Java-based server for providing OGC web services. GeoServer runs on top of a Java web server, such as Jetty or (recommneded for a production environment) Tomcat. GeoServer can be downloaded from http://geoserver.org/download/, the latest stable build is version 2.8.0. A number of modules and extentions exist for adding functionality, such as the INSPIRE plugin geoserver-2.8.0-inspire-plugin.zip (for adding INSPIRE extended capabilities to your services), and the Application Schema plugin geoserver-2.8.0-app-schema-plugin.zip.
GeoServer is a good choice if you wish to set up both a GeoSciML-Portrayal WMS and WFS. When considering using GeoServer for a GeoSciML-Portrayal service you are limited to using a vector data source, by default you would use either an ESRI shape file or a PostGIS database, but you can use any number of other databases (ArcSDE, DB2, H2, MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server, Teradata) by adding the appropriate extention. Element names in the output XML are determined by the field names in the data source. Shapefiles use dBase tables to contain thematic property data, and the field names in a shape file are limited to 10 characters in length. Because some of the fields in the GeoSciML-Portrayal schema are longer than 10 characters, ESRI shapefiles are not suitable as a datastore for GeoSciML-Portrayal services that utilize the simple configuration approach in GeoServer. A more complicated configuration schema utilizing an ‘application schema’ is also available to GeoServer users, but to avoid this complication, it is recommended to use PostGIS as the data store for GeoServer GeoSciML-Portrayal implementation.
This procedure assumes that you have a working GeoServer implementation with PostGIS, and that you have administrative privileges necessary to create workspaces, stores, and layers accessible to GeoServer. In order for services to be publicly accessible, the host and port of the GeoServer instance must be configured to allow remote access to the GeoServer instance.
Section last modified: 21 October 2015