Geospatial interoperability specifications from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) are robust and extremely powerful, but they can also be complex, ambiguous and costly for software http://www.carbontools.com) as your “weapon of choice” for OGC-based rapid application development.

Bringing Worlds Together – Standards and Modern Tools for Rapid Application Development

Modern software development systems allow developers to address today's application development challenges more rapidly and effectively than ever before. Tools like Microsoft Visual Studio and the .NET platform provide the easiest route for developers to:

• Rapidly create solutions that span multiple platforms
• Easily develop next-generation Internet applications
• Reduce time-to-deploy powerful, scalable enterprise applications

Geospatial software systems have leveraged these tools for years but standards from the OGC are providing new potential to creatively address geospatial information sharing and integration challenges.  The combination of OGC standards and modern software development systems open up the potential for a whole new class of innovative geospatial solutions.  CarbonTools brings these worlds together for the first time.

Open Geospatial Development - The Vision of the Carbon Project

As a product of the Carbon Project, along with the popular free viewer Gaia, CarbonTools is a “developers toolkit” for OGC-based geospatial interoperability. CarbonTools works by exposing development libraries that provide a sophisticated API for a complete control over any WMS or WFS source.  Based on Microsoft’s powerful Component Object Model (COM) and .NET technology, CarbonTools encapsulates OGC data access, parsing and processing functions into an easy-to-use software development toolkit. CarbonTools also breaks new ground in the geospatial industry by integrating open source software with commercial software components. The .NET technology in CarbonTools is all open source software, making it the only geospatial interoperability product to combine the extensibility of open source software with the power of a commercial product.

The Carbon Project’s vision is to create a community of practice for open geospatial development by sharing source code and providing free software for the benefit of the CarbonTools users and the global geospatial community. Developers using CarbonTools will benefit from this community by exchanging ideas, software components and even geospatial data. In an effort to energize this endeavor, a geospatial design competition, the Carbon Cup, has been organized by GeoLeaders, the United States distributor for CarbonTools. The Carbon Cup is an open competition for http://www.geoleaders.com/carboncup.html).

A Quick CarbonTools Technical Overview

One of the closely-held secrets of interoperability is that OGC Web Services tend to vary from one vendor to another. Also, the robustness of OGC specifications sometimes leads to ambiguity in implementation, even among OGC-compliant products.  CarbonTools is the product of years of experience that’s been leveraged to alleviate this problem for application developers by internally supporting many of the variations found in services from multiple vendors. Some of the functions that have been integrated into the CarbonTools rapid application development toolkit include:

• COM libraries that handle WMS/WFS interactions, OGC “capabilities” parsing, GML parsing and feature geometries management. These libraries provide a sophisticated API for a complete, easy-to-use control over any WMS/WFS/GML source.
• GML parser that handles complex feature data and metadata, including support for multiple geometry types in a nested structure.  As any developer can tell you, parsing GML can be a challenge and this tool takes care of the work for you.
• The Geometries library provides storage for parsed GML and a platform for feature editing and annotations.  This is a vital function for putting GML to work for you or your (or your customers). 
• The Capabilities parser handles WMS and WFS capabilities including transparent support for OGC-defined properties inheritance.
• WMS and WFS libraries which provide an API for complete server access and response handling, including server errors and exceptions.
• .NET controls that wrap advanced functionality into simple “drag-and-drop” type components. Sophisticated functionality such as ‘server capabilities’ tree-view type display, and multi-layers WMS/WFS display with map-tools such as zoom and pan are included. All the controls are provided as open source software with the complete source code to allow maximum “customizability” by the developers.
• Numerous samples that demonstrate the power of CarbonTools are provided with their source-code included.
• Developer license includes unlimited and unrestricted distribution. There are no software or hardware plugs to deal with.

Supported Open Geospatial Consortium Standards

The following OGC standards are currently supported by CarbonTools Version 1.1 (more features will be supported in future versions):

• WMS versions 1.0.0, 1.1.0, 1.1.1
• WFS version 1.0.0, including WFS-T
• GML2, GML3 (Level 0 profile)
• Support for Filters and enhanced queries.

Towards the New Model for Open Geospatial Solutions

CarbonTools proves that geospatial solutions built on open standards are not only viable, but offer a better long-term return on investment and meet requirements for interoperability more appropriately than proprietary, single vendor solutions. Multi-vendor solutions developed using CarbonTools offer users new experiences currently unavailable by any other means.  This is all made possible by the new OGC Web Services model for building distributed geospatial applications combined with the power of modern software development systems like CarbonTools.  Check it out, you won’t be disappointed.

Authors:
Nuke Goldstein, ngoldstein[at]thecarbonproject.com
Jeff Harrison, jharrison[at]geoleaders.com