Conclusions and Future Outlook - Open Source Geospatial Tools: Applications in Earth Observation - page 322

￿ gdalinfo displays the palette, which is boring (and generally unneeded). It
would be preferred that gdalinfo doesn't display it by default, and that a new -ct
option replaces the -noct option;
￿ ogr2ogr arguments are destination file then source file, while gdal_trans -
late is source file then destination file.

19.1.2 Other Emerging Developments

Geospatial data storage and processing demands are increasing at a faster pace than
desktop computers can currently handle. This has lead to the emergence of a newbusi-
nessmodel based around InternetWeb services, and recently around cloud computing
where computational and data storage resources can be consumed (and purchased)
on demand. This shift in geospatial data store and analysis has required a new set of
data formats that are largely underpinned by Standards to facilitate interoperability.
Over the last decade, a number of the Standards defined by the OGC have become
common place and include:

￿ Web Map Service (WMS), which delivers map images to clients via the Web on

request;

￿ Web Feature Service (WFS) that provides an interface to request geographical

features (vector data) over the Web;

￿

Web Coverage Service (WCS), which permits the retrieval of digital raster data
over the Internet that can be requested based on time and location.

Several other OGC Standards have also been defined such as the Sensor Obser-
vations (SOS), tile services for Web Map Services (WMTS) as well as formats that
have been described in previous sections, Keyhole Markup Language (KML), Geo-
graphic Markup Language (GML) and NetCDF. More recently, OGC has defined the
”GeoPackage” Standard that is an alternative to existing geospatial formats like the
ESRI Shapefile, but that is based on the Spatialite database and is fully interopera-
ble between operating systems and geospatial packages. In many ways, it resembles
Spatialite although it provides the possibility to store both raster and vector data. It
is important to note that GDAL (version 1.11.0 onwards) supports GeoPackage as
well as many of the above-mentioned OGC Standards.
With Web Processing Services (WPS), a client can also request the execution of
a process via the web. The process is executed on a server and the result is returned
back to the client. As in the case of cloud computing, processing is moving away
from the local desktop towards a remote server. One of the benefits is that data can
be provided as a service in the form of XML based documents over the web, without
actually being transferred. Processing is performed at the location of the data and
only the result is returned to the client. The result (e.g. a map) has typically a reduced
size with respect to the raw data that was used as input for the process.