Background and Requirements¶

Background¶

When you publish geospatial data on the Internet, chances are that you are required to do so within the context of a Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). Publishing data in an SDI requires you to ensure a range of standards and protocols are supported. The Bridge extension takes care of properly exporting your map data and metadata to map and catalog services that comply with these standards.

The servers currently supported by Bridge are GeoServer and MapServer map servers, GeoNetwork Opensource catalogue server and any CSW transactional compliant catalogue server. The Premium version of Bridge supports publishing map data to a PostGIS server.

You can also choose to save the metadata and map symbology (in the form of Styled Layer Descriptor (OGC-SLD) or a MapServer mapfile) documents on your computer so you can use them to publish on other server software.

Although not required, it is highly recommended that you have instances of a GeoServer and GeoNetwork Opensource available and that you have accounts on those servers with enough privileges to publish map data and metadata.

GeoServer is the reference implementation of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Feature Service (WFS) and Web Coverage Service (WCS) standards, as well as a high performance certified compliant Web Map Service (WMS).

MapServer is an Open Source platform for publishing spatial data and interactive mapping applications to the web. Originally developed in the mid-1990’s at the University of Minnesota, MapServer is released under an MIT-style license, and runs on all major platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X). MapServer is not a full-featured GIS system, nor does it aspire to be.

`GeoNetwork Opensource<http://geonetwork-opensource.org>`_ is the reference implementation of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Catalog Service for the Web (CSW). It also supports the ISO19115, ISO19119 and ISO19110 metadata standards. The GeoNetwork Opensource software complies with the requirements of INSPIRE.

Requirements¶

Client requirements¶

To install and run Bridge the following software is required:

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1
Esri ArcGIS® Desktop 10.0 or higher (10, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5 including minor releases such as 10.5.1)

Server requirements¶

GeoNetwork¶

To publish metadata GeoNetwork version 2.4.0+ is required. Note that GeoCat recommends to use the latest stable previous and current stable release of GeoNetwork in combination with version. GeoCat only delivers full support on the GeoCat Bridge.

MapServer¶

To publish map data to MapServer the requirements are as follows:

MapServer 5.6.0 or higher. Note that GeoCat recommends to use the latest stable version. GeoCat only delivers full support on the previous and current stable release of MapServer in combination with GeoCat Bridge.
FTP connection or file write access to MapServer project path

Note

When using MapServer 5.X and PostGIS 2.X it is required to load legacy.sql from your PostGIS installation folder on your spatial database. Legacy.sql can be found in in your PostGIS installation folder.

GeoServer¶

To publish map data to GeoServer the requirements are as follows:

GeoServer 2.1 or higher with the Chart Renderer extensions installed. Note that GeoCat recommends to use the latest stable version. GeoCat only delivers full support on the previous and current stable release of GeoServer in combination with GeoCat Bridge.
On a Linux server it is recommended to install the msttcorefonts package. Some of the symbols from the default Esri® fonts are mapped to equivalent Webdings and Wingdings symbol fonts.