Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] [OpenSDI] associating WFS or WCS to WMS services - how-to?

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Jeroen, You could certainly put a WFS / WCS URL in to DataURL, but that does not have a place for describing the semantic of the URL except as an opaque reference. Fine for a client with inside knowledge, but not very general. Most combined services provide an implicit link by naming the layer and the featuretype identically. This is also not very general or explicit. My suggestion for now as a more general approach would be to use the same MetadataURL for all service offerings (layers, featuretypes, coverages, etc.) based on the same data. There can also be multiple MetadataURL's in an offering, distinguished by a language or schema label. One could even define a dataIdentifier schema (e.g. URN schema) to hold this specific ID information. Yes, at least one MetadataURL  should point at a real data description, but a URI it can also be a global key for the association across any number of services. A client could then match the URI between capabilities documents to determine the association and a catalog could show (all of) the service offerings for a given dataset. Cheers, Josh On Nov 9, 2005, at 1:19 PM, Jeroen Ticheler wrote: Hi! We are trying to find the (most suitable) way of associating a WFS or a WCS to an existing WMS service. The purpose of this is that we can use WMS to display the interactive maps while we use the WFS/WCS to extract data from the server and make it available to the user as GML, shapefile, GeoTIFF etc... to be downloaded from an FTP or directly for local use. The problems we have are two-fold: 1- What is the best location in a Capabilities document to do this? We want our client application to know of the existence of the WFS or WCS service. What we think as best candidates are: - the DataURL element  (definition: A server may use DataURL to offer a link to the underlying data represented by a particular layer. The  enclosed Format element indicates the file format MIME type of the data file.) - or the FeatureListURL element  (definition: A server may use a <FeatureListURL> element to point to a list of the features represented in a Layer.   FeatureListURL is not inherited by child layers. The enclosed Format element indicates the file format MIME  type of the feature list.) 2- If we use one of these, we think of putting in the link to the service and a suitable MIME type. We have seen the following MIME types used for WMS and WFS getCapabilities requests, but are not sure they are standard and also we didn't find any reference to a similar WCS MIME type. What to do??? We found: application/vnd.ogc.wms_xml and application/vnd.ogc.wfs_xml - Should we use these MIME types to indicate the URL points to a WMS or WFS getCapabilities? - Should we assume we can use  application/vnd.ogc.wcs_xml for a WCS getCapabilities MIME type!? We have not found any of the application/vnd.ogc MIME type registered at http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/  What should be our conclusion on that? Thanks in advance! Ciao, Jeroen & Stefano _______________________________________________ OpenSDI mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.eogeo.org/mailman/listinfo/opensdi