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Operational Review #10
ORNL-DAAC
- Describe in a sentence or two your overall operational experience related to WMS. (e.g., scientific visualization; geospatial visualization, etc). What kinds of WMS servers and/or clients do you have experience with? (e.g., commercial products, open source, or independent implementations, please provide as much detail as possible).
- The ORNL-DAAC implements two separate deployments of WMS. Both of these are supported as client and server. ArcIMS 9.1 and Minnesota mapserver 4.4.1 were used for these installations. WMS version 1.1.1 has been implemented in both cases. The WMS specification has been used to provide users with direct access to data and allow them full control on the visualization schema, format etc. Also to provide a means to combine multiple WMS sources from multiple data providers and let the users visualize the datasets as one unified system.
- What types of applications do you use WMS servers/clients for? Are they suitable for your applications? (e.g., Do they work well with the data types and data manipulations in your application?)
- The ORNL-DAAC uses mostly the visualization features in WMS. We have very limited data manipulation tools using WMS. Overall, the WMS specifications are pretty robust for visualizations and work well with most data types but for data manipulation we use WFS and WCS specifications.
- Why do you choose to use WMS over other protocols for your applications?
- Easy to implement and are more popular, widely used as compared to the other Open GIS specifications. Also, some of the features in WMS had good significance in our project.
- Are the WMS systems easy to use? (e.g., Is it hard to learn how to use WMS systems?)
- It does take some amount of effort to grasp the technicalities behind the WMS system. The documentations are pretty good and the rising awareness in Open GIS specification should make it easy to use in the future.
- Does the performance of the WMS systems you have experienced meet your requirements? (e.g., Does it take a long time to access/view data in WMS systems?)
- Yes, it meets our requirements. We haven’t had any performance problems.
- What operational challenges do the WMS systems present? (e.g., Does it require advanced processing power, large amounts of memory, complex configuration, etc.? Are the systems easy to deploy and maintain?)
- The WMS system is fairly simple and easy to maintain.
- How well do the WMS systems scale to large numbers of simultaneous users, or to large datasets?
- For 2-3 simultaneous users, the system performs normal without any performance loss. For a dataset of size 1.5 GB, we haven’t experienced slowness in data visualization. However, with increasing complexity, such as projection, resolution changes etc, the system experiences some performance loss.
- Can you provide information on user statistics of your WMS systems? How have the user statistics changed over time?
- Not available at the moment.
