I keep this blog entry relatively short and only outline the highlights and requirements for the new release as GeoCouch finally has a real home at http://gitorious.org/geocouch/. Feel free to contribute to the wiki or fork the source.

Highlights

• Many geometries are supported: points, lines, polygons (using Shapely).
• Queries are largely along the lines of the OpenSearch-Geo extension draft. Currently supported are bounding box and polygon searches.
• Adding new backends (in addition to SpatiaLite) is easily possible.

Requirements

• Linux 2.6.26
• CouchDB 0.10.0
• Python 2.6.0
• couchdb-python 0.6.x (0.6.0 doesn't work)
• Shapely 1.0.12
• APSW - Another Python SQLite Wrapper 3.5.9-r2
• SpatiaLite 2.3.1

Other versions might work.

Download

If you don’t like Git, you can download GeoCouch 0.10.0 here.

I did it! I'll speak on the FOSS4G Conference 2009 (Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial Conference), 20th–23rd October in Sydney about “CouchDB and Geodata”. More information is available at the official website.

You can either add a _list function as described in the documentation or use my futon-list branch which includes an interface for easier _list function creation/editing.

Your data

The _list function needs to match your data, thus I expect documents with a field named location which contains an array with the coordinates. Here’s a simple example document:

{
   "_id": "00001aef7b72e90b991975ef2a7e1fa7",
   "_rev": "1-4063357886",
   "name": "Augsburg",
   "location": [
       10.898333,
       48.371667
   ],
   "some extra data": "Zirbelnuss"
}

The _list function

We aim at creating a _list function that returns the same response as a normal _view would return, but filtered with a bounding box. Let’s start with a _list function which returns the same results as plain _view (no bounding box filtering, yet). The whitespaces of the output differ slightly.

function(head, req) {
    var row, sep = '\n';

    // Send the same Content-Type as CouchDB would
    if (req.headers.Accept.indexOf('application/json')!=-1)
      start({"headers":{"Content-Type" : "application/json"}});
    else
      start({"headers":{"Content-Type" : "text/plain"}});

    send('{"total_rows":' + head.total_rows +
         ',"offset":'+head.offset+',"rows":[');
    while (row = getRow()) {
        send(sep + toJSON(row));
        sep = ',\n';
    }
    return "\n]}";
};

The _list API allows to you add any arbitrary query string to the URL. In our case that will be bbox=west,south,east,north (adapted from the OpenSearch Geo Extension). Parsing the bounding box is really easy. The query parameters of the request are stored in the property req.query as key/value pairs. Get the bounding box, split it into separate values and compare it with the values of every row.

var row, location, bbox = req.query.bbox.split(',');
while (row = getRow()) {
    location = row.value.location;
    if (location[0]>bbox[0] && location[0]<bbox[2] &&
            location[1]>bbox[1] && location[1]<bbox[2]) {
        send(sep + toJSON(row));
        sep = ',\n';
    }
}

And finally we make sure that no error message is thrown when the bbox query parameter is omitted. Here’s the final result:

function(head, req) {
    var row, bbox, location, sep = '\n';

    // Send the same Content-Type as CouchDB would
    if (req.headers.Accept.indexOf('application/json')!=-1)
      start({"headers":{"Content-Type" : "application/json"}});
    else
      start({"headers":{"Content-Type" : "text/plain"}});

    if (req.query.bbox)
        bbox = req.query.bbox.split(',');

    send('{"total_rows":' + head.total_rows +
         ',"offset":'+head.offset+',"rows":[');
    while (row = getRow()) {
        location = row.value.location;
        if (!bbox || (location[0]>bbox[0] && location[0]<bbox[2] &&
                      location[1]>bbox[1] && location[1]<bbox[2])) {
            send(sep + toJSON(row));
            sep = ',\n';
        }
    }
    return "\n]}";
};

An example how to access your _list function would be: http://localhost:5984/geodata/_design/designdoc/_list/bbox/viewname?bbox=10,0,120,90&limit=10000

Now you should be able to filter any of your point clouds with a bounding box. The performance should be alright for a reasonable number of points. A usual use-case would something like displaying a few points on a map, where you don’t want to see zillions of them anyway.

Stay tuned for a follow-up posting about displaying points with OpenLayers.

After almost six months of silence I finally managed to get a prototype done (thanks Jan for keeping me motivated).

What do you get?

You get some code to play around with, to get a slight idea of how such a geospatial extension for CouchDB could look like. The code base isn’t polished yet, but it’s good enough to get it out of the door. The current version only supports one geometry type (POINT), and one operation (a bounding box search).

As CouchDB doesn’t allow an intersection of results gathered from an external service, the result of the bounding box search will be plain text document IDs and their coordinates.

How does it work?

GeoCouch consists of two parts, the indexer and the query processor. Both are connected through stdin/out with CouchDB.

Indexer (geostore)

In order to make the indexer understand which fields in the document contain geometries, a special design document is needed. As soon as a database has such a document, the database is geo-enabled and the indexer will store the geometries in a spatial index, which is a SpatiaLite database at the moment.

Everytime a database in CouchDB is altered (create, delete, update) the indexer gets notified and will act accordingly to keep the spatial index up to date with CouchDB.

Query processor (geoquery)

To process queries with an external service is possible with Paul Joseph Davis’ excellent external2 CouchDB branch. Queries to CouchDB can get passed along to an external service.

At the moment the result is the output of this service, it’s plain text in our case. In the future the external service will only return document IDs which will be passed back to the view. The result will be an intersection of document IDs of the view and the document IDs the external service returned.

How do I use it?

When everything is installed correctly it’s quite easy to get started.

Setting things up

• Create a new database named geodata (could be anything).
• Add a document named myhome, there you’ll store all the information of your home including the coordinates. As we are only interested in a bounding box search it’s enough to have a location:

  {
    "_id": "myhome",
    "_rev": "3358484250",
    "location": [ 151.208333, -33.869444 ]
  }

• Add as many other documents like this, make sure all of them have a field called location with the coordinates as array. As for the database, the name of the field could be anything, but has to be the same in all documents.
• Now we come to the interesting part, the special design view that geo-enables the database. The document has to be named “_design/_geocouch”. After creating it also needs some special fields and will look like this:

  {
    "_id": "_design/_geocouch",
    "_rev": "610069068",
    "srid": 4326,
    "loc": {
      "type": "POINT",
      "x": "location[0]",
      "y": "location[1]"
    }
  }

  The coordinate system that should be used is specified by an SRID. If you don’t know which value to use for srid, use 4326. It’s assumed that all geometries in your document belong to the same coordinate system.

  The other field is the information where to find the geometry in the documents. The name you choose will be used for the bounding box queries, I’ve chosen loc. It defines the type (POINT), and where to find the x/y coordinate (this will probably be changed to lat/lon in the future).

  The way to specify where to find the field is comparable to XPath, but much simpler. As JSON consists of nested dictionaries and arrays, you can get a property within an array with the index (e.g. location[0] is the first element in an Array called location). If it is a dictionary you specify it separated by a dot (e.g. location.x is a property named x within another one called location). It can of course be nested much deeper, the path always starts at the root of the document (e.g. bike.stolen.found[0]).

Bounding box search

And finally you can make a bounding box search. Simply browse a URL like this one (this is a bounding box that encloses the whole world):

http://localhost:5984/geodata/_external/geo?q={"geom":"loc","bbox":[-180,-90,180,90]}

The expected result is:

myhome 151.208333 -33.869444

Requirements

You’d like to give it a try? Here is a list of the software and their versions I used to get it work on my system, but others might work as well. GeoCouch includes installation/configuration instructions.

• Linux 2.6.26
• Python 2.5.2
• APSW - Another Python SQLite Wrapper 3.5.9-r2
• SpatiaLite 2.2
• davisp’s external2 branch of CouchDB

Download GeoCouch

Get SpacialCouch now! It’s new, it’s free (MIT licensed).

• GeoCouch 0.0.1

What’s next?

The current version is meant to play with, many things are not possible, many things needs to be improved. But with the power of SpatiaLite (and the underlying libraries) it shouldn’t be too hard.

Therefore I hope this will only be start and will end up in a discussion on what should be done, what other things might be possible. I’d love to hear your use cases for a geospatially enabled CouchDB.

CouchDB

From the official website:

Apache CouchDB is a distributed, fault-tolerant and schema-free document-oriented database accessible via a RESTful HTTP/JSON API.

The word database is often connected to RDBMS, but CouchDB is way different. You don’t store your data in predefined tables and fields with certain data types like INTEGER or VARCHAR, but every database record is stored on it’s own (in so-called documents).

In RDBMS you build relations between several tables to store and receive the data; in a document-oriented DB (DODB) one record is stored after another (these records can, of course, be splitted into several documents that might even reference each other through their ID). The structure of these documents doesn’t matter for their storage. The big advantage is that if a new property is needed, just add it to the document. There’s no need to change any global context (like schema definitions of tables in RDBMS).

Geodata

I haven’t found a good definition for geodata, so here’s my own:

Geodata is data with a spatial reference.

This data is not restricted to the spatial reference only. Far more important is the actual (meta)data that is connected to this spatial reference. This data describes what it is all about. It could be a house with information about its number, age, size or a measuring station that monitors the temperature.

Are you serious?

Why should someone want to put his geodata into a big mess of thousands of documents instead of a nicely structured RDBMS? You don’t have to be a computer scientist to know that retrieving data out of a RDBMS is damn fast and a DODB approach sounds like a slow, “I grep through a long list of files”.

This might partly be true, but high performance shouldn’t be a use case for DODBs. Their flexibility and ease of usage is what they make them perform great. You have the choice between being fast or being flexible.

The use case

Flexibility over performance for geodata services has a use case when it comes to interoperability between different data sources.

Imagine you are the governor of a big country that consists of several smaller territories. Each of these have a smart guy that developed (independent of all the others) a system to collect data about how many bicycles topple over per day. It’s a geo-spational system, as the exact location where it happend is stored in the database.

All territories use a RDBMS, but from different manufacturers. In addition they store the information about the bikes differently. One territory distinguishes between bicycle for children, youth and adults; another one stores the size of the felly instead. Those information could be mapped very easily to a uniform one, but the territories don’t want to give up the infrastructures of their current systems. They still want to collect their data in their way.

What you really want is a solution to be able exchange the data easily between the territories and have uniform way to access the data country wide.

Solution I

To exchange their data they set a new layer of transformation above the current DB. The output will be a new format they both agreed on. This sounds like a good solution for the problem, but there are a few downsides:

• The transformation could be very difficult to express with SQL. This could lead to huge slow downs. This isn’t such a big problem if you just exchange the data, but a big advantage, the speed of RDBMS, gets lost.
• The transformation layer needs to support for DBs of different manufacturers.
• Queries across territory borders seem difficult. Will all servers serve all data? Will you need to query multiple servers to get the data of two territories?
• Heterogeneous environments lead to higher maintenance costs than homogeneous ones.

Solution II

All territories store their data in a new shiny type of DB, a DODB. If they collect the data, it’s currently transformed somehow to fit into a RDBMS. They could either change this and store it directly into the new DB (long term goal) or transform their current data to make it fit.

So what’s the difference between transforming the data from the RDBMS to another RDBMS or to a DODB?

• Transforming to a DODB is more like a dump of the data, thus easy.
• Probably you can’t convert to another existing DB schema, as this will lead to a lost of information. So a new DB schema needs to be created/an existing one altered (every time something new occurs).

Characteristics:

• All data can be stored in one big database, queries across territories are easy (simple “if’s”)
• A single database can be replicated easily.
• Queries are slow compared to plain SQL queries on RDBMS, probably not suitable for real-time applications

Solution III

Follow the approach of Solution II but using one gigantic RDBMS that stores the DB schemas of all territories. That would work, too. The difference it that RDBMS wasn’t meant for such things.

Forecast

I think Solution II shows that CouchDB has a big potential in that area. At the moment it's more an idea than a solution, there a still a view contradictions, but these will hopefully be solved.

One crux are speedy retrievals of features within a certain bounding box, this issue will be the spotlight of a future post.