[Freegis-list] WMS services

[Arnulf Christl]

Paul Ramsey wrote:
> http://www.refractions.net/ogcsurvey

Thanks for that one.

This is a very late follow up on the OpenSDI catalog discussion. We have 
added a bunch of disparate WMS to the Mapbender Portal for testing. 
Doing it the hard way, no automatic harvesting, as everybody seems to 
have at least one ugly little glitch somewhere in the services.

Now one of the most wanted features expressed at the Mapbender user 
meeting last week was to comfortably add WMS (this oh-so-complicated OGC 
stuff drives people nuts :-).
This is far from being a hybernating object-mapper but the services can 
be loaded with two clicks (i know - thats still one too much!). Could 
still be good for some, please comment on this try:
http://www.mapbender.org

Open issues:
- Some WMS will not load due to strange (though technically correct) 
grouping (our fault)
- servers that boast too many layers (carol wms 1315 layers) explode web 
administration interfaces. The client eats it anyway, it just takes a 
minute or two...
- what to do about incompatible SRS? We want to keep it simple, if you 
pop up a message saying <SRS not supported> people will just be 
frustrated. -> First thing will be to add all new SRS as they are 
loaded. But you can't just switch without giving notice?!
- Some WMS will not load because a root layer doesn't have a name only a 
title (its in the spec but we use the name for handling - our fault)
- Navigating to a new service is difficult if you do not have a bbox in 
the corresponding SRS. Probably there is no way but to call a coordinate 
transformation service as the caps provide bboxes for WGS84 and the 
first following SRS only.

What we'll do next is address above problems and try out any WMS we can 
lay hands on. i am still pretty impressed at how very different OGC WMS 
specs can be interpreted. If you have or know of more WMS Capabilities 
please baffle us some more.

<rant>
Hopefully people will start to give apropriate names, titles and 
abstracts to their services. It is a big nuisance for any geo admin to 
find out what hides within a service titled "ESRI Inc. Map Server" 
abstracted as: "This is an OGC compliant MapService served By ESRI. The 
engine used to serve this MapService is ArcIMS". Who cares.
(not that we are any better, you find "WMS" with abstracts "blank" all 
over the place).
</rant>

Without any useful metadata we are lost.

Best,
Arnulf