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:
  • http://terraservice.net/ogcmap.ashx?version=1.1.1&REQUEST=getmap
&LAYERS=DRG&SRS=EPSG:4326&BBOX=227476,2221563,232979,2228442
&WIDTH=512&HEIGHT=512&FORMAT=JPEG
• 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)