if you are in a organisation where you store data with geographical information associated with it , then you have the option of sharing your data using the following standards specified by OGC:
One way to leverage these standards is to use the geoserver project for data storage and the openlayers project web for showing and editing maps.update 2009-09-03: When integrating with the extjs framework , then it is worth using the geoext project.
An example snippet from geoserver shows the use of WFS-T for inserting geometric data with associated metadata for an alley in Tasmania. I’ll just bring it here:
xmlns:topp="http://www.openplans.org/topp"
xmlns:gml="http://www.opengis.net/gml"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.opengis.net/wfs http://schemas.opengis.net/wfs/1.0.0/WFS-transaction.xsd http://www.openplans.org/topp http://localhost:8080/geoserver/wfs/DescribeFeatureType?typename=topp:tasmania_roads">
494475.71056415,5433016.8189323 494982.70115662,5435041.95096618
Note that oracle has a well supported ways of extracting GML from spatial datatypes if you need to construct the wfs transactions yourself ( oracle locator )
At the first glance wfs can seem a bit complicated. Luckily openlayers has nice wrappings for it that is easily accessed from code as shown in one of their examples running here :
map = new OpenLayers.Map('map');
var wms = new OpenLayers.Layer.WMS(
"State",
"http://sigma.openplans.org/geoserver/wms",
{layers: 'topp:tasmania_state_boundaries'}
);
wfs = new OpenLayers.Layer.WFS(
"Cities",
"http://sigma.openplans.org/geoserver/wfs",
{typename: 'topp:tasmania_cities'},
{
typename: "tasmania_cities",
featureNS: "http://www.openplans.org/topp",
extractAttributes: false,
commitReport: function(str) {
OpenLayers.Console.log(str);
}
}
)
map.addLayers([wms, wfs]);
var panel = new OpenLayers.Control.Panel({
displayClass: "olControlEditingToolbar"
});
var draw = new OpenLayers.Control.DrawFeature(
wfs, OpenLayers.Handler.Point,
{
handlerOptions: {freehand: false, multi: true},
displayClass: "olControlDrawFeaturePoint"
}
)
var save = new OpenLayers.Control.Button({
trigger: OpenLayers.Function.bind(wfs.commit, wfs),
displayClass: "olControlSaveFeatures"
});
panel.addControls([
new OpenLayers.Control.Navigation(),
save, draw
]);
map.addControl(panel);
map.zoomToExtent(new OpenLayers.Bounds(140.64,-44.42,151.89,-38.80));
}
