A Web Map Tile Service (WMTS) is a standard protocol for serving pre-rendered or run-time computed
georeference
Georeferencing or georegistration is a type of coordinate transformation that binds a digital raster image or vector database that represents a geographic space (usually a scanned map or aerial photograph) to a spatial reference system, thus loca ...
d
map tiles over the Internet. The specification was developed and first published by the
Open Geospatial Consortium
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international voluntary consensus standards organization that develops and maintains international standards for geospatial content and location-based services, sensor web, Internet of Things, Geographi ...
in 2010.
History
The
Open Geospatial Consortium
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international voluntary consensus standards organization that develops and maintains international standards for geospatial content and location-based services, sensor web, Internet of Things, Geographi ...
(OGC) became involved in developing standards for web mapping after a paper was published in 1997 by Allan Doyle, outlining a "WWW Mapping Framework".
The oldest and most popular standard for web mapping is
WMS. However, the properties of this standard proved to be difficult to implement for situations where short response times were important. For most WMS services it is not uncommon to require 1 or more CPU seconds to produce a response. For massive parallel use cases, such a CPU-intensive service is not practical. To overcome the CPU intensive on-the-fly rendering problem, application developers started using pre-rendered map tiles. Several open and proprietary schemes were invented to organize and address these map tiles. An earlier specification for this is the
Tile Map Service
Tile Map Service or TMS, is a specification for tiled web maps, developed by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. The definition generally requires a URI structure which attempts to fulfill REST principles. The TMS protocol fills a gap betwee ...
(TMS). It is simpler than WMTS. It was developed by members of the
OSGeo
The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), is a non-profit non-governmental organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data. The foundation was formed in February 20 ...
and is not backed by an official standards body.
Requests
WMTS specifies a number of request encodings:
; KVP: key-value-pairs encoding (over HTTP)
; REST:
Representational state transfer
REST (Representational State Transfer) is a software architectural style that was created to describe the design and guide the development of the architecture for the World Wide Web. REST defines a set of constraints for how the architecture of ...
encoding (over HTTP)
;
SOAP
Soap is a salt (chemistry), salt of a fatty acid (sometimes other carboxylic acids) used for cleaning and lubricating products as well as other applications. In a domestic setting, soaps, specifically "toilet soaps", are surfactants usually u ...
: Simple Object Access Protocol encoding (usually over HTTP)
The syntax for the WMTS request types is different for each of these encodings. Some request types are:
; Capabilities: returns information about the WMTS service parameters
; Tile: returns a map tile
; FeatureInfo: returns (alphanumeric) information for a given map location
; Legend: returns a legend image for the map
See also
*
Open Source Geospatial Foundation
The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), is a non-profit non-governmental organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technology, technologies and data. The foundation was formed in ...
(OSGeo)
*
Tile Map Service
Tile Map Service or TMS, is a specification for tiled web maps, developed by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation. The definition generally requires a URI structure which attempts to fulfill REST principles. The TMS protocol fills a gap betwee ...
(TMS)
*
Tiled web map
A tiled web map or tile map (also known as slippy map in OpenStreetMap), is a web map displayed by seamlessly joining dozens of individually requested data files, called "tiles". It is the most popular way to display and navigate maps, replacing ...
*
Web Coverage Service
The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Coverage Service (WCS) Interface Standard defines a web-based interface for the retrieval of coverages—that is, digital geospatial information representing space/time-varying phenomena. By providing dire ...
(WCS)
*
Web Feature Service
In computing, the Open Geospatial Consortium Web Feature Service (WFS) Interface Standard provides an interface allowing requests for geographical features across the web using platform-independent calls. One can think of geographical features as ...
(WFS)
*
Web Map Service
A Web Map Service (WMS) is a standard protocol developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium in 1999 for serving georeferenced map images over the Internet. These images are typically produced by a map server from data provided by a GIS database ...
(WMS)
References
External links
OGC WMTS
{{OGC
GIS software
Web Map Services
Open Geospatial Consortium