2. Background and Requirements

Background

When publishing data on the Internet it is a common practice to provide the data using standardized exchange protocols. Adopting standards facilitates a wide usage of the data. In the geospatial domain the OGC and ISO TC211 data exchange standards are the industry standards, and for example required by the European INSPIRE regulations. The Bridge extension takes care of exporting your map, data, styles and metadata to opensource mapping platforms that provide data exchange 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 (in combination with GeoServer or MapServer, or standalone).

You can also choose to save the metadata and map symbology (as Styled Layer Descriptor (OGC-SLD)) documents on your computer as files or in a GeoPackage so you can use them to publish on other software platforms (deegree, QGIS).

Although not required, it is recommended that you have a GeoServer or Mapserver and a GeoNetwork Opensource or CSW 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 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

Bridge supports the following versions of ArcGIS® Desktop (including minor releases such as 10.5.1):

  • 10.1
  • 10.2
  • 10.3
  • 10.4
  • 10.5
  • 10.6

Server requirements

GeoNetwork

GeoCat Bridge is officially supported on any GeoNetwork latest (3.4) and 2 versions before (3.0 and 3.2). However most of the functionality will be operational from GeoNetwork version 2.6+.

MapServer

Requirement for MapServer are:

  • Officially supported is the latest minor version of Mapserver and 2 versions before, currently 7.0, 6.4 and 6.2. However any version from 5.6.0 is expected to operate fine in most of the cases.
  • 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

Requirement for GeoServer are:

  • Officially supported versions are 2.13, 2.12 and 2.11. However other versions since 2.4 are expected to operate fine in most of the cases.
  • 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.