FeatureServer and OpenLayers information

FeatureServer is an implementation of a RESTful Geographic Feature Service. Using standard HTTP methods, you can fetch a representation of a feature or a collection of features, add new data to the service, or delete data from the service. Use it as an aggregator -- post your GeoRSS feeds to it, and then browse them using WFS. Use it as a translator: use the OGR DataSource to load a shapefile and open it in Google Earth.

This software also is able to use a PostGIS as it's storage and information mechanism. In addition to this, there are several options for input/output:

• GeoJSON -- input and output in the emerging GeoJSON specification. FeatureServer supports GeoJSON Points, Lines, and Polygons with Rings, as both input and output.

• GeoRSS Atom (Simple) -- input and output of Points/Lines/Polygons (no rings/holes) in GeoRSS Simple (Atom). This allows one to take any GeoRSS Simple Atom feed and feed it to FeatureServer for storage.
• KML -- Input and output of Points, Lines, and Polygons from KML.
• GML/WFS -- Output-only support of WFS/GML.
• HTML -- Output-only support of features as HTML files, powered by Cheetah templates.
• OSM -- Output-only support of features as OpenStreetMap '.osm' files. (These files can be opened using JOSM and posted to the OSM server.)

Since the iPhone is very capable of reading the JSON data format and it is very useful for tabular data. I have already discusses using JSON earlier in the semester with Robert Kosara and he seems to think that it would be a very efficient and easy way to transfer data to the iPhone. Plus there are several programs available that read data from JSON for the iPhone, such as TouchJSON which can be found at this link: http://code.google.com/p/touchcode/.

As soon as I am able to get a test machine up and running with the new version of Postgresql I will be able to install these things and test them out. Then we can begin developing methods to transfer this information over to a format that will be displayed properly on an iPhone.

The image below shows the framework of the featureserver and the many storage and input/output options: