Technical Architecture for Land Monitoring Portal using Google Maps API and Open Source GIS

Geo-spatial web portal is regarded as one of the attractive applications from both users and providers in GIS domain. Especially, in the mashup theme using open API provided by general portal such as Google or Yahoo, web mapping application is the top-ranked one. However, web mapping, one component in geo-spatial web, has been the long-term task in the GIS communities, and web mapping components for registering, manipulating, retrieving, and publishing of scalable contents in the target-based application are also diversifying. Moreover, GIS standards are one of the crucial factors to web-based applications. The implementation of land monitoring portal, dealing with multiple sources and multiple types of data contents is the main task. Land monitoring requires the basic components for geo-spatial web portal with the functionalities as linking to other contents concerned, accessing to actual data sets, metadata crawling and harvesting, as well as spatial querying and web mapping. In this work, land monitoring architecture is designed with the basis of open source GIS programs and web mapping API, and Google maps API is used in client-side browser. In this client system, external data sets can be loaded and overlain on geo-based layer from Google mapping server. For server-side processing in this portal system, PostgreSQL and PostGIS are applied for database contents managed by system operators or providers, and Deegree is used for middleware to exchange OGC-GIS standard data formats or other formats what users want. While, in this system, this tier structure can be customized according to operation environments or land monitoring data structure: multi-client system and one middleware system or multi-client system, middleware, and server engine. The main advantages of this architecture are the cost-effectiveness due to free open source, the easiness of system optimization which can be fitted the performance requirement of a target system, and the modularization for light-weighted application implementation.