52°North SOS Quickstart

The 52°North SOS is a web service, that allows you to provide and collect spatial sensor data (including metadata and measurements/observations).

This Quick Start describes how to:

• Query the 52°North SOS Capabilities to determine what queries it suports
• Query details about an Observation from the SOS.

Contents

• 52°North SOS Quickstart
  • Getting Started
  • Things to Try
  • What Next?

Getting Started

1. Select Geospatial ‣ Web Services ‣ 52North ‣ Start 52North SOS to start the 52°North SOS.
2. This will open the 52°North SOS test client welcome page in firefox at http://localhost:8080/52nSOS/. Open the test client by selecting the version you would like to use, 1.0.0 for example:

Fig. 1: 52°North SOS test client - welcome page

3. The test client can be used to send requests to the service using a simple form. A drop-drown list allows you to select from a collection of predefined requests, which are adapted to the respective service version selected in the step before.

Fig. 2: 52°North SOS test client - specification version 1.0.0

4. Lets start by determining what data can be queried from the SOS by sending a GetCapabilities request. Select the GetCapabilities_allSections.xml request from the drop-down list next to “Request Examples” (see number [1] in Fig. 2).
5. Push the Send button (number [2] in Fig. 2) and the request will be transmitted to the 52°North SOS. As result, a XML document is returned (see Fig. 3), which shows the capabilities of the SOS (service metadata such as keywords or provider, available operations and filters, contained observation data,...). To see the original response open the source view (Ctrl+U).

Fig. 3: 52°North SOS - GetCapabilities response (XML encoded)

6. Once you know the capabilities of a SOS, you can craft appropriate queries. Again, this is made easier by selecting sample queries from the test client pull down list. For instance, lets get details about the latest Observation by selecting the GetObs_latestObs.xml request from the drop down menu and press the Send button.

Things to Try

• Try some of the other example queries from the pull down list.
• Try tweaking some of these queries to get different information.

What Next?

To learn more about 52°North SOS and/or the 52°North Sensor Web Community, potential starting points are:

• The 52°North SOS overview,
• The 52°North Sensor Web mailing list: swe@52north.org,
• Check the 52°North Sensor Web community forum,
• Check the 52°North SOS Client,
• 52°North SOS website, or
• The website of the 52°North Sensor Web Community.
• When the SOS is not available, please check if the tomcat servlet engine is running using the following command:

user@osgeolive:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/tomcat6 status
* Tomcat servlet engine is running with pid 1234          <-- Tomcat is running
[...]
* Tomcat servlet engine is not running.                   <-- Tomcat not runing, so please start:
user@osgeolive:~$ sudo /etc/init.d/tomcat6 start
* Starting Tomcat servlet engine tomcat6           [ OK ] <-- Tomcat is running, now

Listing 1: Tomcat Status and Start (password for sudo: user)

• The development of this version of the 52°North SOS was supported by the European FP7 research project EO2HEAVEN (co-funded by the European Commission under the under grant agreement n°244100):