Web interface for loading geo-spatial data

[Dimitar Misev]

rasdaman is a domain-independed array DBMS, but via it's petascope component it becomes a geo-spatial server with support for various OGC standards — WCS, WCPS, WCS-T.

Currently data can be loaded into rasdaman in two ways:

1. By using the rasql language, e.g. via the rasql client tool. This does not provide support for inserting geo-spatial information, which needs to be done manually with SQL scripts.
2. By using rasimport, a client tool based on GDAL which can extract geo-information from the input files and automatically insert it into petascope, along with the data into rasdaman.

WCS-T (an OGC standard for updating coverages) is on the agenda for implementation in petascope. A prerequisite for WCS-T implementation is enabling petascope (a Java servlet) to insert coverages itself. There are two possibilities for achieving this:

1. Use native system calls to the rasimport command-line tool, which would be very hackish and potentially dangerous.
2. Implement it directly in petascope by using the Java bindings for GDAL, and provide a generic interface that can be used by WCS-T implementation or further clients.

Further work would then include

• Implementing WCS-T
• Implementing a web application (an admin page in petascope), that allows to easily load data by selecting files and filling in metadata details (in case it's missing from the files themselves and GDAL can't figure it out).

Related ticket #292