[QGIS-Developer] What to do with WMS Server Search

[Paolo Cavallini]

Hi Jonathan,
thanks for your thougths. I am in favour of replacing the current 
service with Geoseer.
Objections anyone?
How do you suggest to proceed?
Cheers.

Il 2020-01-21 12:55 Jonathan Moules ha scritto:
> Hi List,
> Hopefully I can offer some insights into this as someone with some
> experience in spatial service discovery (I run GeoSeer:
> https:/www.geoseer.net - a search engine for spatial web services).
> 
> -----
> csw.geopole.org is what I believe is behind the search button. As it
> stands right now, this service has the following stats for *working*
> WMS services:
> * Points to 229 services that have data
> * Across 63 hosts
> * with 3,938 layers
> It has 0 working WMTS, WFS, or WCS entries.
> 
> That might seem like a lot, but GeoSeer's index has the following:
> * 218,861 services
> * across 5,000 hosts
> * with 2,048,346 datasets/layers
> More stats: https://www.geoseer.net/stats/ - The index is regularly 
> refreshed.
> 
> So basically the Geopole service has less than 0.1% of the OGC
> services that are out there (GeoSeer's index isn't exhaustive, but it
> is several times larger than the next largest I know of).
> 
> ---
> 
> Just to be clear, I'm not trying to sleight the GeoPole service,
> instead I'm highlighting a problem that is rarely considered: Manually
> searching CSW's/data portals is almost pointless.
> 
> Basically, there are at least 391 CSW services out there (325 of which
> work). Is it reasonable to expect users to be able to find them all
> and manually search them, even with a plugin?
> And even if a user did search them all, between them, all those 325
> working CSW's only have about 5% of the spatial web services that are
> actually out there and working! You're still missing 95% of them!
> 
> This is why the solutions suggested here while good in theory don't
> really work. At best they're a placebo.
> 
> Co-incidentally, I did a blog post on this exact thing just a few days
> ago - https://www.geoseer.net/blog/?p=2020-01-10_dataportal_problems
> 
> ----
> 
> Solution?
> You're welcome to point users to GeoSeer's free web search - it's
> completely free and there are no adverts (because ethics).
> 
> GeoSeer also has an API which is designed for exactly this sort of
> thing - https://www.geoseer.net/api.php - it lets you integrate the
> search directly in the application. It's not free because that's how
> GeoSeer covers its costs. I have considered creating a GeoSeer plugin
> for QGIS that uses the API but the business case hasn't been there
> yet.
> 
> I'm open to questions if you want more stats, or have any 
> thoughts/comments.
> Cheers,
> Jonathan
> 
> 
> On 2020-01-20 10:10, Alexander Bruy wrote:
>> Hi devs,
>> 
>> while checking open issues I have found one about WMS Server Search
>> functionality https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/issues/25660.
>> 
>> It is about Server search tab in the "Add WMS/WMTS layer" dialog. This
>> search tab uses configurable catalog URL which by default is set to 
>> Sourcepole's
>> server. According to Pirmin, this catalog didn't get many updates 
>> since years.
>> Also we now have a MetaSearch plugin which is our "new" way to search
>> for OGC services.
>> 
>> What we should do with WMS Server Search? In the ticket there are two 
>> options
>> proposed:
>> 
>> 1. remove WMS Server Search completely and put a hint suggesting user
>> to use MetaSearch plugin
>> 2. remove default catalog URL from the QGIS settings and show WMS 
>> Server
>> Search tab only when user have entered an URL
>> 
>> Thoughts?
>> 
> 
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-- 
Paolo Cavallini - www.faunalia.eu
QGIS & PostGIS courses: http://www.faunalia.eu/training.html