We've hinted at it in previous blog posts, but now it's time for the big reveal: the GeoSeer API is live!

Designed to allow you to integrate the power of GeoSeer's search into your business's Web GIS or other application, the API allows your users to easily and seamlessly search for datasets without having to leave their normal tooling. There's an entire-page with information about it here.

As well as including all the features you're used to in the web-search, the API also includes some cool new features:

• Bounding Box Search - Search for datasets that are within, disjoint, or intersecting a given bounding box, while also using a search term. Ideal for searching for layers that overlap the user's current viewing area.
• Lat/Lon Search - Easily find datasets that intersect a specific point. Your user selects a location and now they can find data that intersect it. Simple.
• Service Type filter - Only find datasets that are of the OGC service type(s) that you're interested in. Does your application only support WMS and WFS for instance? Then filter results to only search those service types.
• Service Search - The GeoSeer web search only allows users to search datasets/layers, but the API also allows searching by service. Readily find services hosted by anyone from local government, through to global spanning organisations like the World Food Programme and everyone between.

We've created the snazzy GeoSeer API WebGIS that demonstrates the API in action, giving you a feeling for what you can do with it and how it could integrate with your own application(s).

The API has several plans to cover various needs, and the Enterprise plan allows for considerable customisation so you can get exactly what you need. So take a look and find out more about the API

Today GeoSeer celebrates its first birthday, having originally gone live on 2018-03-03, so we want to look back at the year and take a glimpse into the future.

This year we...

It has been a busy year for us. We added CSW harvesting in May, a stats page for our fellow big-data nerds in September, and a new look, along with an API beta in January. This blog was itself created in April, and got its own RSS feed back in January.

Ever more data

We've also done a lot of general work to try and increase the index size, but not at the cost of spurious results. When we went live a year ago, our index had (using our current methodology) 836,917 distinct layers from 89,825 services. Today we boast 1,229,623 distinct layers (46% more) from 167,882 services (89% more).

During our latest crawl, our index size jumped to well over 3 million layers. "Jackpot" we thought! But upon further investigation (because we're always suspicious of anything anomalous - you have to be if you want to develop something good) we discovered it was from a single host that claimed to have 2.1 million layers across about 5000 services. Deeper investigation showed that it seems that it's the same 500 layers shared thousands of times. So we removed them all from the index and only keep one of each layer to ensure the best possible results for you, our users.

What's next?

At this point it's becoming apparent that we're hitting the point of diminishing returns. We don't think there are many more readily discoverable OGC services and layers out there. We currently scrape over 300 data portals, plus many other data sources to try and find every service we can, but we can only find services which are publicly advertised somewhere, hence the "readily discoverable". But we're not giving up yet, and we have some ideas for several more scraping methodologies to further enhance the index.

And of course we'll also be releasing the API shortly. Watch this space!

We thought we'd welcome in 2019 with a slight update to the look of the site to improve usability. In particular, the GeoSeer website should now be much better behaved on mobile devices. There's also now more consistency in page navigation to help you find where you're going, and we've tweaked the search results page to better expose meaningful information, including the service's url.

The changes are not just cosmetic, we've also improved the search functionality to try and provide better results for multi-term queries. So searches for things like tree preservation orders will now preferentially try and find results where the words are next to each other without your having to put quotes ("") around it. We've also done a fair amount of work to the location assignment service (the bit that decides what area of the planet a bounding box covers) so you should be getting better results there too.

And as if all that wasn't enough, there are a couple of new features - this blog now has an RSS feed so you can better keep up with our posts.
But we've been keeping the best until last - we now have an API! It's still in beta for the next few weeks but if you're interested in using it, do let us know. There's an entire page with information about the API on it, and we'll be doing a blog post about it when we launch it.