Pizza points and polygons - Gaia WFS-T Demonstrated with ArcGIS Server 10

Video of 2010 Developer Summit streaming on Internet

Rapidly adding the locations of pizza stores, census block groups and other data was part of the OGC demonstration at the recent 2010 ESRI Developer Summit in Palm Springs, California. The bottom line for the ESRI team doing the demo was the Gaia "WFS-T Extender" provides an easy way for anyone to contribute geospatial data using Web Feature Service Transactional (WFS-T) services on desktop systems - including ESRI's slick new ArcGIS Server 10.

As we've discussed before - when you look at the geospatial community a key emerging area are open geospatial services like those in ArcGIS Server 10 that offer new angles on data production. What's that angle? ArcGIS Server 10 and other products implement Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) WFS Transactions - a standard way for users to pull in geospatial information and then contribute back their own content. But to make it easy for anyone to contribute a user-friendly app was needed that plugs-and-plays with any system - and Gaia WFS-T Extender fills this need (as was demonstrated in Palm Springs).

The Gaia WFS-T Extender allows geospatial edits and updates using WFS-T and Geography Markup Language (GML) in both online and offline environments - wrapping OGC standards into easy-to-use tools accessible to anyone, including non-GIS users. A complete description of the tool set is available here. The app plugs-and-plays with WFS-T from ESRI and other vendors - and I hope it promotes collaborative SDI.

The Gaia WFS-T Extender is also part of CarbonCloud Sync - a Cloud or server-hosted collaboration capability for crowd-sourcing data production and updates over a network of OGC services.

If you want to try it yourself a Gaia WFS-T Extender evaluation is part of the latest Gaia package and available for download now