A general problem in GIScience is that there is too much data, from an arbitrary number of sources represented in a enourmous amount of languages. Therefore the solution is typically to use only one source of information and hard-link it to the map-rendering system. Such as Google Maps and similar.
A vivid discussion on NRKBeta’s pages (norwegian) started from their post on user’s comments on how they should develop a new system intended to be used by the norwegian trip association (typically hicking off road) for planning trips of any sort and be a portal for everything tour/trip/hicking related.
Not surprisingly a suggestion on using OpenStreetMap came along – spawning a “wild” discussion on the capabilities of open source maps/geoinformation and even open source in general.
I took a more lean approach to this and argued that combining “the best of every world” would be the best solution. And thus referencing to trends like service-orientation, loose coupling and similar. I believe this must be a quite good approach to the “problem” of having too much information, where subsets of different providers is appropriate to the task in question – regardless of cost, licensing and other more managerial issues. Atle posted an idea of making a similar approach in his master thesis. In response to this idea I sketched an architecture that could enable this, the architecture is inspired partly on the INSPIRE directive in addition to the general service-orientation.
Service oriented architecture for a geo-centric system
The architecture aims at illustrating where complexity of implementation may adhere. I believe however, that an implementation is feasible and possibly a rapid prototype feasible when taking a low-level approach while maintaining the conceptual idea. The numbered circles are to indicate reference points that is made in a wiki-page (norwegian..) regarding this architecture, the MS Visio file can also be found there.
What do you think of this architecture? Is it feasible? Is it overly complex? Is it good? Has anyone tried to implement something similar?
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