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

[Jonathan Moules]

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?
>