Why should I use a WMS?

OGC’s web map services differ from traditional desktops and workstations and previous Internet-based mapping applications in a number of ways.

Before OGC WMS, traditional desktop mapping applications:

• Used local data.
• Were not compliant with standards.
• Were unable to access spatial data held by different agencies in different locations.

After OGC WMS, you now can:

• Consume data online without having to maintain it.
• Publish your data through an open standard.
• Easily and seamlessly integrate disparate data sources into applications.

OGC’s WMS standards are documented and freely available to developers. This approach has led to more involvement and interaction from the geospatial community.

Before you start

It’s important to understand the difference between clients and servers, both of which are part of a client-server architecture. Servers are powerful computers dedicated to managing disk drives, printers or network traffic. Clients are personal computers or workstations on which users run applications; they can also be the applications that rely on servers to perform some operations.

As a developer, you can both consume data through your application that supports web maps services (client) and publish data through a web map server.