[Geowanking] A plea for those setting up WMS, WFS, WCS services

[Jody Garnett]

Jody Garnett wrote:
> Sonny Parafina wrote:
>> For those folks who are setting up public OGC WMS/WFS/WCS services, I 
>> have a request.
>>
>> PLEASE STOP SETTING YOUR BOUNDING BOX TO THE ENTIRE WORLD!
>> (unless you actually are providing coverage for the world)
>>
>> The reason is that it makes spatial queries in a Catalog absolutely 
>> useless.  For example, I loaded Refractions Research list of OGC 
>> services into our catalog, a query for roads with a world bounding 
>> box returned ~220 results, the same query with a bounding box around 
>> Boston yielded ~210 results.
>> I have been guilty of this as well, so I'm no angel. However, I have 
>> recognize the error of my ways and I am prostletizing against this 
>> form of spatial spam.  A little parsimony goes a long way.
> Wonder if we can every trust em?  Perhaps we should set a "metadata 
> look-aside service". One that all us client apps can consult for a 
> second opinion, basically user supplied corrections for specific 
> WMS/WFS/WCS Layer information.
>
> Of course this requires the us to trust something, on the the 
> capabilities document ... perhaps we should just record the original 
> bbox and the correction. As long as the service is showing us the 
> original value we will know that they have not fixed the problem ...
>
> ...snip...
>
> Still would annoy those with cascading WMS servers ... but then again 
> they annoy me.

Idea - fight fire with fire.  Clients often work off a single get 
Capabilities URL (and then hunt around in the document for the rest of 
the info they need).

Since these are well understood formats, we could make our look-aside 
service take the URL to the capabilities document. If it is known it can 
patch the document as it is returned, if it is unknown it can pass it 
through unmodified ...

Sounds like a great way to lazily generate a catalog of layers ... and 
it has a value add to data users so they would actually make use of it.

Thinking, a few clients would not enjoy the experience, the ones that 
expect to hack at the servers URL and don't like a separation between 
entry points between capabilities, getMap, etc ... Pretty sure we have 
disappointed that assumption often enough on the wibbly wobbly web by now.

Sounds like I need to visit Paul Ramsey with a bottle of Scotch and see 
how well his Perl hacking skills hold up.
Jody