5.3. GeoServer
GeoServer (Deoliveira, 2008) is an open source web application that is used to view and edit geospatial data using standards from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). GeoServer is a more mature server than ncWMS, it has better documentation, the users can easily modify the output format of the web feature service (used by the identify feature), and it provides additional features for vector layers, like CQL filtering or been able to request data in JSON format. For those reasons we believe it is better suited for serving geospatial data that is not stored as NetCDF files. For the Deep-C
MapViewer project, GeoServer is configured to serve the Blue Marble dataset (the background layer) and several vector layers,such as the state boundaries of the U.S. and the bathymetry contours of the Gulf of Mexico. There is extensive documentation on the GeoServer website (http://geoserver.org/) on how to configure vector and raster layers on the server.