Geospatial SOA using RESTful web services

In this article, we discuss how geospatial data and services can be exposed over the Web. We introduce REST, outline a RESTful implementation of geospatial Web services that provides simple and open access to geospatial data over the Web using standard Web protocols. The term REST was introduced by Roy Fielding in his Ph.D. dissertation and describes an architecture style of networked systems. The motivation for REST has been to rely on the simplicity of the HTTP protocol and data exchange based on XML.