Cartographic portrayal of visual flight information on OGC web services using open source software

Cartography, as many other disciplines, has also substantially been affected from the remarkable progress of the Web phenomenon in recent years and the use of the web for design, production, dissemination and portrayal of maps has gained popularity. In the past, maps were simple images on the Web, but today there is ubiquitous Web services approach, which makes instant production of maps possible according to the requests of users. Web service is briefly defined as a software component produced by service provider, which delivers the final product to the user. Web services are typically performed together with Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) pattern with two common ways. These are World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and REpresentational State Transfer (REST) Web services. Besides, the standards such as WFS and WMS, issued by Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), a leading organization for open geospatial standards, mostly conform to the REST pattern but they can also be implemented with the W3C Web services. Software is the one of the most important concepts, which comes into our lives together with the computers. Today, there are commercial softwares, produced by the companies as well as free and open source softwares, produced by volunteered programmers in the market. In recent years, the production and development of open source software has gained momentum along with the adoption of 'pay for the support not for the software' philosophy by some companies. With this philosophy, a software stack called OpenGeo Suite has been released using existing open source softwares for head to toe Web mapping applications. In aviation maps, which are produced by adding special aviation information and symbology on topographic maps, the update of aviation information is more frequent than topographic information. For this reason, aviators have confronted with outdated maps. In this study, a Web mapping application was implemented using open source software and OGC standards so as to solve the problem mentioned above. In this application, visual flight information that aviators need has been encoded with OGC Symbology Encoding standard and added on the topographic map and thus an aviation map has been obtained, which is ready for updating or printing purposes.