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Nov 29th, 2021
Refractions Research Receives GeoInnovations Funding for Web Services
Refractions Research has won a GeoInnovations grant to pursue research in spatial data validation technology. The $73,000 government grant will support a year long research and development project to develop tools for automatic spatial data quality control and validity checking.
"Online spatial databases require technology to ensure data validity across a large number of quality control axes", said Paul Ramsey, President of Refractions. "Ordinary business rule enforcement mechanisms only handle the attribute side of data quality. Spatial business rules are much more complex."
The Refractions validation technology is being written in Java, and will be deployable as a standalone data validation application or as a cartridge within the GeoServer Web Feature Server. GeoServer provides an OpenGIS™ standard Web Feature Server interface to backend relational databases.
"OpenGIS Web Feature Server is going to be a prominent standard for data exchange", said Ramsey, "but the standard lacks a means to ensure that incoming data does not break or corrupt structures in the database. Our validation technology will close that gap, and automatically ensure than incoming data is clean and consistent with the rest of the data."
GeoInnovations is a GeoConnections strategy to promote Canadian technology development. GeoConnections is a program of the Canadian federal government.