Towards Automatic Feature Type Publication

The purpose of the WFS specification, proposed by the the OpenGIS Consortium (OGC), is to describe the manipulation operations over geospatial data using GML. Web servers providing WFS service are called WFS Servers. Their objective is to provide queries, updates and exchange of geospatial data as geographic features instances encoded in GML. This work proposes an approach for automatic feature type publication by WFS servers, where a feature type is specified by the feature type schema and a set of correspondence assertions. The feature type correspondence assertions formally specify relationships between the feature type schema and the base source schema. The adoption of correspondence assertions allows the automation of feature type publishing and maintenance. This paper presents an algorithm that automatically generates, based on the feature type correspondence assertion, the configuration file required to publish the feature type by a Deegree WFS.