Flexibility for San Mateo Powered by OGC Standards
The Open Geospatial Consoritum has published an article on how Farallon Geographics developed a solution for San Mateo County, using a standards-based approach, that would give users access to data via both Google Earth and a high end desktop client, such as GeoMedia or ArcGIS, from a single web service.
The City of San Mateo, California stores its data in a relational database: SQL Server. It uses GeoMedia from Intergraph for editing, mapping and analysis. It publishes its maps on the Web using GeoMedia Web Map. But the City also wanted an option to use Google Earth as map publishing tool because it makes accessing GIS data easier and more engaging.
Farallon’s solution involved deploying Open Geospatial Consoritum Web Map Services (WMS) and Web Feature Services (WFS) and tweaking them so that Google Earth could read them. By using open standards San Mateo could use any client software that supports WMS and WFS alongside Google Earth. Similarly, if San Mateo wanted to use Google Earth to view data published by another vendor’s Web mapping software that supports WMS or WFS, the tools Farallon built would work equally well to create the needed Google link and file support.