52°North SOS Quickstart

Getting Started

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

1. Go to Geospatial ‣ Web Services ‣ 52North ‣ Start 52North SOS to start the 52°North SOS or use this direct link. (If the service is not reachable, try to start the Tomcat servlet engine following the steps at the bottom of this page.)
2. Firefox will open the 52°North SOS test client welcome page (see Fiq. 1). Please select the specification version you would like to use, 1.0.0 for example:

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

3. The test client appears. It 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 adopted to the respective service version selected in the step before.

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

4. To get started with the SOS, 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 a 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. In Order to build your own requests you will need the capabilities of the 52°North SOS (specification 1.0.0). Using the information provided in the capabilities, and most importantly the contents section, you can adjust the provided requests in the test client. Just select a GetObservation request (GetObs...) from the drop down menu and use it as a template get your own observation subsets.

Additional Information

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):