associating WFS or WCS to WMS services - how-to?

[Jeroen Ticheler]

Hi Bart,
Thanks for the suggestion. However, reading through the different WMS  
specs, the DescribeLayer is not among the operations allowed in the  
ISO19128 specs and is only available for SLD supported WMS's for  
version 1.1.1  so it doesn't seem an option!? I noticed MapServer  
implementing it on WMS, but it does not seem to be part of the standard.
Any other suggestions?
Thanks again,
Jeroen


On 9 Nov 2005, at 13:25, Bart van den Eijnden wrote:

> Hi Jeroen,
>
> isn't the WMS DescribeLayer request purposed just for this? It  
> isn't directly accessed through WMS Capabilities but a separate  
> request to the WMS service.
>
> Mapserver WMS can return the WFS (vector) or WCS (raster)  
> associated with the WMS layer as a DescribeLayer response.
>
> Best regards,
> Bart
>
> Bart van den Eijnden
> Syncera IT Solutions
> Postbus 270
> 2600 AG  DELFT
>
> tel.nr.: 015-7512436
> email: BEN at Syncera-ITSolutions.nl
>>>> Jeroen Ticheler <JEROEN.TICHELER at FAO.ORG> 11/09/05 1:19 PM >>>
> 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