Spatial Data Web Services

Overview

HydroShare allows users to upload and publish common spatial data files like Geotiffs as geographic raster and Esri shapefiles as geographic features. To improve interoperability and accessibility the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) defined standards for web services (OWS) that allow geospatial functionality across multiple platforms. They include services for data access, data display and data processing. The three most widely known OWS are Web Mapping Services (WMS), Web Feature Services (WFS), and Web Coverage Services (WCS).

HydroShare provides a service that publishes geographic raster and feature resources as OGC compliant webservices. HydroShare relies on GeoServer, the proven open source service for sharing spatial data to provide this functionality.

What can you do with Spatial Data Web Services in HydroShare?

Resources that contain raster and shapefile and are made public can now be embedded in many common GIS applications like ArcGIS or QGIS utilizing the OGC standard interface. The HTTP URLs needed for OWS can be found on the resource homepage in a new section titled “Data Services” below the “Content” section.

Note: web services URLS are only available for resources that are made public and contain all necessary GIS metadata.

Web Mapping Service (WMS) is a standard protocol that serves static georeferenced map images either as a JPEG or PNG. Symbology for a layer generated using a WMS connection can only be changed using an associated SLD file for the specific layer in the GIS data.

Web Feature Service (WFS) is a standard protocol that describes discovery, query, or data transformation operations for GIS shapefiles. Layers generated using a WFS connection interact the same as layers uploaded directly to the GIS client.

Web Coverage Service (WCS) is a standard protocol that acts similar to the WFS protocol but for geospatial information representing space/time-varying phenomena (e.g. raster datasets).