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GCN Home > 05/30/03 web stories

Mappers write Cookbook 1.0 for Web services

By Susan M. Menke, GCN Staff

The Open GIS Consortium Inc. has put together a batch of not-yet time-tested recipes in Cookbook 1.0, the first in a planned series about Web map services.

The Wayland, Mass., consortium’s Web Map Service interface specification makes a browser overlay—a maplike raster-graphic image—of multiple data layers from one or more distributed geographic information systems.

The recipes tell users how to insert a WMS client into various commercial and open-source products such as ESRI ArcExplorer and ArcIMS, FreeBSD, Intergraph GeoMedia WebMap, Java deegree, Microsoft Internet Information Server and University of Minnesota MapServer.

A WMS client can be an HTML page returned by a WMS server or a browser plug-in using Java or ActiveX to connect to different servers. The client can specify which layers to display from a specified geographic area, the file formats and the degree of transparency.

Like a real cookbook, the 170-page document reproduces thousands of lines of code—recipes for interfaces—put together by various contributors. For example, Recipe 6 tells how to use a certain downloadable 3-D map viewer. It specifies a 1-GHz processor, 128M of RAM and an nVidia GeForce 2 or better graphics card. The 3-D viewer can pan, zoom, fly through and rotate map views.

Information also is included for mobile wireless display of maps. Download the cookbook from www.ogcnetwork.org.







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