MoreIntergraph Mapping and Geospatial Solutions, Huntsville, Ala., expanded its commitment to the advancement of enterprisewide interoperability by making source code from the company's established Web Map Server (WMS) Viewer (www.wmsviewer.com) available to the community at large. Online since spring of last year, Intergraph's WMS Viewer facilitates collaboration of geospatial information stored in WMS sources. The thin-client Web-based application enables users to view one or more WMS servers accessed through websites that conform to the WMS interface standards defined by the Open GIS Consortium (OGC). By making the source code of WMS Viewer available, Intergraph is helping professionals and enterprises simplify development of their own website to use as a portal or for viewing, querying and rendering WMS source data. This can be particularly useful in collaborative environments, providing partnering organizations, agencies and suppliers with broad access to geospatial data and easy-to-use tools to manipulate this geographical data.
The source code for the WMS Viewer is immediately available for download at Intergraph's website by accessing http://imgs.intergraph.com/interop/wmsviewer.asp.
Head start for developers
To further simplify the adaptation of the WMS Viewer, Intergraph is making
available a reference guide that details the source code and provides guidelines to customize the WMS Viewer to fit an organization's
applications. Developers can build on the HTML and ASP code to modify the interface to provide a specialized "look and feel" and add functionality
that will benefit their individual applications.
The WMS Viewer source code includes complete functionality to combine data from disparate sources and formats to overlay in a map. The code specifies an intuitive interface that features a toolbar of capabilities for editing servers, layers and context, and querying registry services guides users as they view and format map output. Developers also have access to the recent enhancements made to Intergraph's WMS Viewer. These enhancements include support for the new OGC-specified WMS style layer descriptor (SLD) for more flexible symbology support, a Discovery Catalog interface for intuitive searches of the new OGC Web Registry Service for WMS data, and upgraded capabilities to load and save contextual information.
Providing leadership to promote interoperability
The contribution of source code for WMS Viewer technology is the latest in a
series of industry firsts that Intergraph has accomplished in an effort to
promote data access and sharing among organizations and agencies throughout
the industry. Recent initiatives Intergraph has undertaken include:
- Joint interoperability testing on the company's Geography Mark-up Language (GML) data server with leading European national mapping agencies Ordnance Survey and Topografische Dienst Nederland (TDN) (Dutch National Mapping Agency)
- Availability of interoperability kits to facilitate data sharing and access, based on a customer-driven collaboration between Autodesk, Intergraph, Laser-Scan and MapInfo, using Oracle Spatial, the market-leading, open enterprise database technology.
- The presentation of 29 Open Interoperability Grants to date from Intergraph's initiative that donates software to organizations seeking to incorporate OGC standards to develop and deploy open standard spatial data infrastructures. For more information about the Open Interoperability Grant Program, visit http://imgs.intergraph.com/interop/grant.asp.
With the latest initiatives, Intergraph continues to support the further development of spatial data infrastructures to be used by communications, utilities, transportation, military and intelligence, national and federal government, and state and local government markets.
Source: Intergraph, Nov. 12, 2003
