Wednesday, October 10, 2007

WMS and WFS

WMS

  • Web Map Server (WMS) is a protocol for requesting and serving raster geodata over HTTP
  • a WMS server responds to WMS requests by returning images, usually in common image formats like GeoTIFF, JPEG or PNG
  • a WMS request can either be simply encoded as a URL, or sent via HTTP POST
  • here is an example of a WMS request URL, to get an idea of what they look like:
  • the WMS Cookbook is a guide to implementing an OGC Web Map Server
  • some other useful resources on the OGC Network site
  • there are numerous free WMS server implementations available, including MapServer and Deegree (LGPL)
  • WMS is very general-purpose and hence not particularly efficient or optimized for specific clients.  WMS-C is a wiki for ideas about how WMS could be extended (or subset) with Tile Caching.

WFS

  • Web Feature Server (WFS) is a protocol for requesting and serving vector geodata over HTTP
  • a WFS server responds to requests by returning data in the Geography Markup Language (GML)
  • a WFS server can even support transactions which allow a client to modify data on the server
  • there are numerous free WMS server implementations available, including GeoServer (GPL) and Deegree (LGPL)

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