Master

'

s Thesis 2006 

FACHHOCHSCHULE

HOCHSCHULE F

U

R

LI Hui 

STUTTGART

TECHNIK

Background 

        STUTTGART UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED 

SCIENCES 

this research the considered devices are the mobile phone model which has Symbian 

OS. 

2.2  Web Map Service   

Web Map Service (WMS) is an International Standard (ISO 19128: 2005 Geographic 

information     Web  map  server  interface)  which  defines  a  "map"  to  be  a  portrayal  of 

geographic  information  as  a  digital  image  file  suitable  for  display  on  a  computer 

screen.  WMS  is  a  specification  that  produces  maps  of  spatially  referenced  data 

dynamically  from  geographic  information.  WMS produced  maps  are  generally 

rendered  in  a  pictorial  format  such  as  PNG,  GIF  or  JPEG,  or  occasionally  as 

vector based  graphical  elements  in  Scalable  Vector  Graphics  (SVG)  or  Web 

Computer Graphics Metafile (WebCGM) formats.   

An OGC compliant WMS applies to three different requests: GetCapabilities, GetMap 

and  GetFeatureInfo.  GetCapabilities  and  GetMap  requests  are  mandatory, 

GetFeatureInfo is an optional request. Each server that follows the Web Map Service 

specification has to provide the interface to the users to input the standard parameters 

and  if these parameters are valid the server  must serve the data corresponding to the 

request. The methods to send the request from a client to a server are various. If the 

client  is  a  browser,  the  parameters  are  sent  inside  the  Uniform  Resource  Locator 

(URL); if the client is mobile device the request is sent also in URL though wireless 

net. 

For GetCapabilities request, if the parameters are inputted correctly, the service level 

metadata in form of XML document will be returned, including the information about 

the  image  formats  and  layers  which  are  available  in  the  server,  the  corresponding 

coordinates  system  names,  the  bounding  box  value  for  each  coordinates  system,  the 

map formats and the contact person and so on. 

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