In What is Web 2.0? Tim O'Reilly distinguishes Web 2.0 from the first generation of Web applications and to me the most important differentiator is participation. Web 2.0 technology enables all of us to participate in building content. The power of Web 2.0, in Tim O'Reilly's words, is that it is a platform for "harnessing collective intelligence". The best known example of Web 2.0 is Wikipedia, whose content is provided by its users, you and me.
A critical challenge to participation is interoperability--integrating the islands of technology that characterize most information technology (IT) organizations. The adoption of earlier attempts to create a standard framework for distributed computing such as CORBA and DCOM were hampered by their complexity.
In a recently published article in OSBR Haris Kurtagic and I outline a simpler web services approach based on Representational State Transfer (REST)
, introduced by Roy Fielding. For a recent introduction see the book on REST by Richardson and Ruby. The most attractive features of REST to me, and a major difference compared to SOAP (which unlike it's name suggests is not that simple) is that you do everything by URLs and the only web protocol you need is HTTP. This means among other things that RESTful Web services go through firewalls without special configuration. In this article we outline critical challenges of the aging workforce and interoperability facing utility, telecommunications and transportation firms, mention how important open standards are in addressing these challenges, the contribution the open source geospatial community, and then discuss how to expose geospatial and GIS data and services over the Web using a RESTful implementation developed by one of us (HK). We then introduce a web site developed using these RESTful Web services by Jason Birch at the City of Nanaimo.
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