Soil Data Access is the name of a suite of web services and applications whose purpose is to meet
requirements for requesting and delivering soil survey spatial and tabular data that are not met by
the Web Soil Survey and Geospatial Data Gateway websites. These requirements include:
Provide a way to request data for an ad hoc area of interest of any size.
Provide a way to obtain data in real-time.
Provide a way to request selected tabular and spatial attributes.
Provide a way to return tabular and spatial data where the organization of that data doesn't have to
mirror that of the underlying source database.
Provide a way to bundle results by request, rather than by survey area.
The ad hoc area of interest requirement is addressed, at least in part, by providing web services and
applications capable of processing requests for spatial and tabular data, where an area of interest can be
expressed by either a variety of spatial filters, or by using a SQL query or Shape command capable of
referencing spatial entities represented in the underlying tabular data.
The real-time requirement is addressed by providing web services and interfaces that are capable of
servicing a request in real-time.
The selected tabular and spatial attributes and alternative organization requirements are
addressed by requiring the use of SQL queries and Shape commands in order to request
tabular and spatial data. This combination allows tabular results to be
returned either as a single table or multiple tables.
The requirement to bundle results by request is addressed by virtue of the fact that, by design, the result of any
request for this suite of web services and applications is always bundled by request. In other words, as far as this
suite of web services and applications is concerned, no other bundling options exist
(it is possible to programmatically-define a "persistent Area of Interest" that allows
the soils data in the pAOI to be referenced at a later time via all of the web services).
The Soil Data Access suite provides no option to return a predefined set of tabular attributes,
although we do provide a variety of sample SQL queries that can be adapted to one's needs.
