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Operational Review #4
NASA SVS
- 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).
- We use WMS for several semi-operational projects. We produce visualizations of numerical model outputs (atmospheric forecasts), possibly layered with satellite images or vector data. We use an open-source product (UMN Mapserver) for the images and vector data, and in-house software based on IDL (Interactive Data Language) for visualizing the model data.
- These two WMS applications are instantiated for several different projects by having project-specific configuration files.
- Besides the server components, which are accessible by any WMS client, we have a dedicated client component. The client is an HTML-based thin client written in-house. The same client is instantiated for several projects.
- 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?)
- WMS has worked very well for our applications. The primary customers are scientists; secondary customers are all others including general public. The model data we visualize are 6-dimensional (longitude, latitude, elevation, run start time, forecast time, parameter), and WMS has been able to accomodate those characteristics.
- Why do you choose to use WMS over other protocols for your applications?
- WMS was chosen because it fulfills the project requirements, because of a desire to use vendor-neutral interoperability specifications, and because of prior familiarity with WMS.
- Are the WMS systems easy to use? (e.g., Is it hard to learn how to use WMS systems?)
- Reasonably easy, but not trivially so.
- 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?)
- Performance has been good with the single system and modest loads experienced thus far. UMN Mapserver, in particular, is excellent at handling raster data stored as tiled GeoTIFFs with overviews.
- 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?)
- No particular challenges. A heavy load would benefit from distribution over multiple machines. This is particularly true for the IDL-based server, which is limited by the number of IDL licenses allocated to the server.
- How well do the WMS systems scale to large numbers of simultaneous users, or to large datasets?
- Not enough information to answer.
- Can you provide information on user statistics of your WMS systems? How have the user statistics changed over time?
- Not enough information to answer.
