The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) defines a number of standards, both for data models
and for online services, that has been widely adopted in the Geographical Information System
(GIS) community. This has lead to a number of software development efforts, online data
archives, and application communities. We survey these in the first part of this report. We
furthermore find that the OGC standards are very compatible with Web Services standards,
although they are not technically implemented this way. We therefore, in the second part of
this report, describe our group’s efforts to reimplement OGC standard services as web
services. We focus particularly on the Web Map Service.
We also have built bridging services that allow our Web Service compatible WMS to interact
with non-Web Service versions of WMS. Cascading WMS is the key point in our proposed
solution for the interoperability problems in the GIS WMS services. Since Web Service
oriented WMS has different request response paradigm from non-Web Service versions, we
have extended cascading WMS by adding request handler functionality. This kind of WMS
behaves like both a cascading WMS and a proxy to handle different types of requests to
overcome interoperability problems between different WMS systems.