GeoREST 1.0 Released

seen on Geoff’s blog – Between the Poles

The first major release of GeoREST has been announced by Jason Birch and Haris Kurtagic. GeoREST is a new open source RESTful framework that works with existing open source libraries such as MapGuide and FDO to publish and interact with geospatial data as web resources, in the tradition of FeatureServer and the ArcGIS REST API.

With GeoREST 1.0 you can enable search engines like Google and Bing to crawl your geospatial data, dynamically publish to KML, GeoRSS or any other text based format, and use web forms to search and update your data. All of this functionality is available entirely through configuration…no programming is required! For some practical examples, here are two sites, in Nanaimo, BC and Slovenia, that have been using GeoREST in a production environment for over nine months, with great improvements in the accessibility of their data.

GeoREST is an independent open source project licensed under the LGPL. It is hoped that GeoREST will be integrated with the MapGuide project in the future. It is available for installation on the Windows platform using either the GeoREST built-in webserver or IIS. An overview of GeoREST was presented at FOSS4G 2009 in Sydney.

Mashups using ArcGIS API for JavaScript

In web development, a mashup is a web page or application that combines data or functionality from two or more external sources to create a new service. Using SaaS – Software as a service.

The services used in the mashup sample below are ArcGIS Server REST API services.
REST (= Representational State Transfer ) is a easy way to use ArcGIS services using URL commands in webbrowsers.
There are services that respond with a simple Yes/No or True/False. There are also services that respond with a list of objects within a given polygon for example.