GeoRSS

RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is a W3C standard for accessing frequently updated URL's. Typical applications include newspaper headlines, etc.

GeoRSS is an emerging standard that adds geospatial information to RSS feeds. It's so simple that I was able to create a throw together a script in an hour that queries the GetCapabilities from some SOS servers  and inserts the results into an RSS feed.

This link is the SOS to GeoRSS service chain: http://www.openioos.org/cgi-bin/sos2rss

This URL demonstrates a service chain, that is, the URL runs a script that queries an SOS and then returns GeoRSS. It queries the GetCapabilities of the SOS and links to both the DescribeSensor XML and GetObservation XML. GoMOOS is the default, but the script can take a parameter ?sos= where the list of legal tags is the current list of OOSTethys participants:

GoMOS	SECOORA	MBARI	UNH
MVCO	TAMU	OCEANWATCH	NANOOS
AOOS

http://www.openioos.org/cgi-bin/sos2rss?sos=MBARI

OpenLayers

OpenLayers is a Javascript based mapping library (simliar to Google Maps) that has support for displaying GeoRSS Points on a base map:

http://www.openlayers.org/dev/examples/georss.html

This page displays a world map and has a text-entry box. If you enter the following RSS URL,

http://www.openioos.org/cgi-bin/sos2rss

into the text-entry box and hit return, you'll see something pretty cool.

 GoogleMaps

Google Maps has a Javascript API that can be used to display points on top of base maps. This example connects a collection of SOS data providers in chain with the resulting XML sent to the Javascript API. The scripts that parse the SOS responses are very similar to the sos2rss example above.

Google Maps SOS

uDig

Here's a free Java-based client that you might find useful for service chaining with WMS and WFS: uDig