- 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 1.1.1 as a method for visualizing the GLIMS Glacier Database. WMS allows us to access the database (visually) from multiple locations at once and gives the users of our data a useful method for remotely visualizing data.
- 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 a number of ways. A database search interface uses to WMS to display dynamic maps that represent the most current data holdings and search results. We make several calls to the WMS from remote servers to ensure websites have the most up to date maps. The WMS also provides users with the ability to view quick images of data rather than spend the time downloading the actual data. I would say the WMS is very well suited for our data types, purposes, and goals.
- Why do you choose to use WMS over other protocols for your applications?
- We don't necessarily choose WMS over other protocols, we simply implement every protocol we can in order to provide the public with as much access to our data as possible. We could create images based on user requests and serve data from the database using protocols other than WMS (for example, users could make requests in a web form and we could make images w/ GMT and send them out). WMS makes it easy to receive and fulfill such requests.
- Are the WMS systems easy to use? (e.g., Is it hard to learn how to use WMS systems?)
- From experience I can say that the learn is not that steep. A general knowledge of web-based transactions is all that's needed to understand how a WMS works. A basic WMS is extremely easy to work with, but it helps if you know what your after to begin with.
- 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 of the WMS that I interact with are fast, taking only a few seconds to draw maps. However it depends on the level of detail and the type of data requested.
- 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?)
- One challenge I can think of is the utility of the GetCapabilities output. A user must know what to do with the output in order to understand what the WMS can serve, this isn't a large hurdle and can be easy overcome.
- How well do the WMS systems scale to large numbers of simultaneous users, or to large datasets?
- I've had both fast and slow response times when calling a WMS for global, I can't say whether the speed changes with server load or data volume.
- Can you provide information on user statistics of your WMS systems? How have the user statistics changed over time?
- I can't easily distinguish between calls to our WMS and other database calls from the web. General usage of our database has gone up, but I cannot attribute this to WMS.
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