WMS Connector Overview

The WMS Connector is a Java Web Application that provides an Open GIS Consortium (OGC)-standard Web Map Service (WMS) interface to data served by ArcIMS Image Services. A translation engine receives OGC-standard WMS requests and converts them into ArcXML requests that are forwarded to the published ArcIMS services. The ArcXML responses are translated back into OGC standard responses and are returned to the requesting clients.

The supported requests with the WMS Connector are:

GetCapabilities

GetMap

GetFeatureInfo

About the WMS Specification

The Web Map Server (WMS) is the result of a collaborative effort assembled by the Open GIS Consortium, Inc. (OGC) as part of the Web Mapping Testbed (WMT) project. This effort produced a specification known as the Web Map Server (WMS) Implementation Specification, which can be found on the OGC Web site at http://www.opengis.org.

The WMT initiative is an accelerated, multiphase effort to meet the GIS market’s demand for interoperable, geo-enabled Web technology. The OpenGIS Web Map Server Specification (WMS) is a set of interface specifications that provide uniform access by Web clients to maps rendered by map servers on the Internet. WMS is a service interface specification that:

Enables the dynamic construction of a map as a picture, as a series of graphical elements, or as a packaged set of geographic feature data.
Answers basic queries about the content of the map.
Informs other programs about the maps it can produce and which of those can be queried further.

The recommended prerequisites to using the WMS request handling function in ArcIMS are:

You have read the Web Map Server Implementation Specification Version 1.1.1 and are familiar with the terminology.
You are familiar with XML, well-formed XML, and valid XML.
You are familiar with ArcXML. See the ArcXML Programmer's Reference Guide for further information.
You have at least one ArcIMS Image Service running.

About the WMS Specification

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