Welcome to Module 7, Accessing Geospatial Data.

The goal of the Canadian Geospatial Data Infrastructure is to make Canada’s geospatial databases, tools and services available online. By using commonly accepted standards and specifications to describe your data collections and to make them available through the Internet, you are helping to build the geographic component of the Internet.

To further integrate geospatial data with the many kinds of information available through the Web, you need to use a widely accepted language to share and exchange information. This is currently handled with eXtensible Markup Language (XML). XML is a means of encoding data with human-readable text, and is in widespread use today.

Using an XML “dialect” developed specifically for describing geospatial data, developers can now store, share, combine and associate geospatial data with an increasing number of other types of information. The possibilities for new uses for geospatial data are limitless, and rather exciting.

In this module, you will be introduced to several components of the vision of a geospatial Web, including:

• Encoding and sharing geospatial data with Geography Markup Language (GML);
• Manipulating and modifying data on geographic features with a web feature service; and
• Specifying queries for spatial objects with filter encoding.

This module comprises 17 pages and should take you about 25 minutes to complete.