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Operational Review #6
GMU LAITS
- 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 mainly for geospatial visualization.
- We access different kinds of WMS servers. The servers we access most include the followings:
- George Mason University WMS client and WMS server: http://laits.gmu.edu/cgi-bin/NWGISS/wms. Both the server and the client are included in the NASA Web GIS Software Suite.
- JPL: http://wms.jpl.nasa.gov/wms.cgi
- Institute of Physical Geography, Germany: http://www.geographie.uni-freiburg.de/cgi-bin/mapserv
- University College London (CEOS European Data Server): http://iceds.ge.ucl.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wms
- Demis Web Server, Netherlands: http://www2.demis.nl/mapserver/request.asp
- MapSherpa, DM Solutions Group Inc.: http://mapsherpa.com/cgi-bin/wms_iodra
- 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?)
- We use WMS in our GIS (map overlay), education (GIS/remote sensing map generation) activities. We also use it to browse data quality for remote sensing application.
- Why do you choose to use WMS over other protocols for your applications?
- a) WMS is getting popular due to its interoperable protocol.
- b) it’s useful in overlay a map from a subset of a large data granule onto other georeferenced data (or, to overlay multiple maps from different sources).
- Are the WMS systems easy to use? (e.g., Is it hard to learn how to use WMS systems?)
- It’s easy to use for us because we are quite familiar with the design. We expect that it does need sometime to understand all the parameters in the interface, as with other software tools. For example, many people may not know the coordinate references system IDs. It should not be very hard to learn but there will be a learning curve. The easiness of use also depends on the actual client/server implementation, which can be very different although the protocol is the same.
- 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?)
- Most time the server we accessed can meet our requirement. It should be noted that the performance is dependent more on such factors as implementation, network speed, and server’s hardware configuration than on the WMS protocol.
- 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?)
- Due to its on-the-fly subletting, georectification/reprojection, resampling and reformatting (e.g., HDFEOS to jpeg) capability, a WMS server may require more resources (e.g., CPU, memory) than a downloading service which ships an entire file without performing on-the-fly manipulation. Thus, we expect that there will be operation challenges when it’s used by very large number of users on very large data volumes. However, we expect that there will be multiple (maybe many) servers running simultaneously in an operational environment. It should also be noted that the network requirement will be less as compared with download service because subsetting is often involved.
- Both server and client should be very easy to deploy and maintain.
- How well do the WMS systems scale to large numbers of simultaneous users, or to large datasets?
- See answers to the previous question.
- Can you provide information on user statistics of your WMS systems? How have the user statistics changed over time?
- We don’t have statistics for our WMS server.
