Summary
In this chapter, we have taken a high-level look at what an SDI is and the role that GeoServer plays in implementing one. We discussed how an SDI is built on four core tenets of people, policy, standards, and data. An SDI is much more than just an implementation of technology, but the realization of an SDI is through a physical technology platform. By discussing a logical architecture for an SDI, we discovered that its core can be fairly simple, typically consisting of data storage, a metadata server to enable the discovery of data, and an implementation of a web mapping server that supports open standards. We learned that an SDI should be an open platform that a multitude of tools can connect to and consume data from.
To see how a user might interact with an SDI, we considered two different user perspectives: the first was power user editing data that is stored centrally, and the second was a data consumer who connects to and consumes data from the SDI.
In this chapter, we saw the...
