Overview

OCG Web Services are for retriving and displaying geo spatial data over the internet (Web).

An OGC Web Service is usually not invoked directly. More often, it is invoked by a geospatially aware client application that provides the user with interactive controls. This client application may or may not be web-based.

But because they are Web services they are also accessible in any Web browser. Firefox does a very good job of displaying XML, as does Internet Explorer, in most cases.

So we will examine several OGC based Web Services using a browser and examine how to examine and manipulate them by editing the URL's used to access them.

We will look at: WMS, WFS, SOS and then look at several tools which can also be used to explore Web Services.