Slashgeo

The It is what it is blog has a nice summary of what is REST and its implication for GIS. From the entry: "State Transfer in the public standards-based GIS world (where REST really starts to achieve critical mass) is still all about the read-only flow of data from publishers to browsers. [...] Just becaues those resources have lat/longs doesn't mean that GIS should suddenly be the center of the universe. Why do I have to use KML for resources that probably have extremely rich alternate representations already?" This is the first of a series of upcoming entries.

Geoblogs have been regularly covering REST technology and geospatial applications lately, see the related stories below. Directions Mag offers an informative article named Emerging Technology: Geospatial Web Services and REST which reduces the confusion with REST, SOAP, GET and POST. From the article's introduction: "However, when considering the evolution of geospatial Web services, it turns out that explaining REST and clarifying the discussion suggests the need for a proposal of how to apply REST to geospatial Web services. Such a proposal might help the open source and open standards communities establish better techniques to make geospatial Web services more open and accessible." Meanwhile, you have import cartography explaining how KML could be published in a RESTful manner, and the same blog also suggests serious (?) corrections to the DM article.

Anonymous Voxel writes "From rajsingh.org blog: REST has been a hot topic this year in the geo world. There’s a discussion group, a geographic data server, many blog posts, and email discussions. I’ve been mulling over what this means to OGC over the last couple months, reading RESTful Web Services, and discussing with the various advocates around the community. After all this, I think I know what’s going on, but I don’t think there’s any one clear explanation (despite some nice pieces of the puzzle here and here) available, and there has certainly been little effort to analyze the REST architecture in relation to geographic information systems theory, so that’s what I’ll try to do now." See related stories below.

Despite regular REST coverage this summer (see related stories below), 48% of the 60 answers clearly show how REST is not understood by most geospatial professionals. Of the other half, 26% claim RESTful approaches will prevail, and 16% are waiting for the Open Geospatial Consortium to join the bandwagon. 8% say they don't need REST themselves and no one said REST will have no impact, probably meaning REST is really important. Our new poll ask you about your feelings on the extent of geospatial technology presence on the web. Unrelated, I'll now try to catch up the 1000+ geonews item I missed in the last two weeks due to my accident, expect more stories.