Oracle Spatial and Graph provides the following types of web services.

• Geocoding, which enables users to associate spatial locations (longitude and latitude coordinates) with postal addresses. Geocoding support is explained in Geocoding Address Data.

• Yellow Pages, which enables users to find businesses by name or category based on their relationship to a location. Yellow Pages support is explained in Business Directory (Yellow Pages) Support.

• Routing, which provides driving information and instructions for individual or multiple routes. Routing support is explained in Routing Engine.

• OpenLS, which provides location-based services based on the Open Location Services Initiative (OpenLS) specification for geocoding, mapping, routing, and yellow pages. OpenLS support is explained in OpenLS Support.

• Web Feature Services (WFS), which enables users to find features (roads, rivers, and so on) based on their relationship to a location or a nonspatial attribute. WFS support is explained in Web Feature Service (WFS) Support.

• Web Coverage Services (WCS), which provides access to coverage data in forms that are useful for client-side rendering, as input into scientific models, and for other clients.. WCS support is explained in Web Coverage Service (WCS) Support.

  For an overview of WCS, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Coverage_Service. For an introductory comparison of WCS to related web services, see http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/80948/what-are-the-differences-between-wms-wfs-wcs-wps.

• Catalog Services for the Web (CSW), which describes the Oracle Spatial and Graph implementation of the Open GIS Consortium specification for catalog services. According to this specification: "Catalogue services support the ability to publish and search collections of descriptive information (metadata) for data, services, and related information objects." CSW support is explained in Catalog Services for the Web (CSW) Support.

• Web Map Service (WMS), which supports the rendering of spatial data. Specifically, the WMS 1.1.1 and 1.3.0 implementation specifications are implemented in the Map Visualization Component. This implementation is described in OGC WMS Support in the Map Visualization Component in Oracle Spatial and Graph Map Visualization Developer's Guide.

In the general business sense of the word "user," implementing any spatial web services application involves the following kinds of people.

• Administrators set up the web services infrastructure. Administrators might create database users, grant privileges and access rights to new and existing database users, and do other operations that affect multiple database users.

  • For web feature services, administrators can use the WFS Admin Console to register feature tables and publish feature types.

  • For catalog service for the web services, administrators can use CSW Admin Console to publish record types.

  • For web coverage services, administrators can use WCS Admin Console to publish coverages.

  For example, an administrator might set up the infrastructure to enable access to spatial features, such as roads and rivers.

• Application developers create and manage the spatial data and metadata. They create spatial data tables, create spatial indexes, insert rows into the USER_SDO_GEOM_METADATA view, and use spatial functions and procedures to implement the application logic.

  For example, an application developer might create tables of roads and rivers, and implement application logic that enables end users to find roads and rivers based on spatial query criteria.

• End users access the services through HTTP requests using KVP, POST, or SOAP protocol.

  For example, an end user might ask for all roads that are within one mile of a specific river or that intersect (cross) that river.

From the perspective of an administrator, application developers and end users are all "users" because database users must be created to accommodate their needs. Application developers will connect to the database as users with sufficient privileges to create and manage spatial tables and to use Oracle Spatial and Graph functions and procedures. End users will access the database through HTTP requests.

The chapters about Spatial and Graph web services are written for administrators and application developers, not for end users.

This topic describes actions that apply to deploying and configuring spatial web services, and particularly WFS, WCS, and CSW.

 -Dsdows=<configuration folder path>

Oracle Spatial and Graph provides a Spatial Web Services administration console, which consists of several components to help configure the WFS, WCS, and CSW web service engines, to test each service, and to display error logs for diagnosis. It is shipped within the sdows.ear file.

To access the administration console, go to a URL in the following format:

http://<system-name>:<port>/oraclespatial/

Before you can use any Service page, select a data source from the list of all available data source names. (The currently selected data source is shown in the upper-right corner, and you can change it there at any time.)

• The Configuration File tabs let you modify service parameters like logging level or service provider information displayed in GetCapabilities response.

• The Test tabs for WFS, WCS, and CSW let you create simple requests for different operations, which you can edit to add or modify parameters, and then send as HTTP POST/XML requests. The responses are also displayed.

• The Log tabs for WFS, WCS, and CSW let you display the content of the log files for each service. Each Log tab also lets you download the logs compressed in a zip file, so that you can later use the information to diagnose problems.

The console pages and WFS, WCS, and CSW are described in more detail in the chapters about those services.