|
The 63rd OGC Technical Committee meetings were held the week of December 10th in Stresa, Italy.
The European Commission Joint Research Centre and ORCHESTRA sponsored the meeting.
The Wednesday evening reception and dinner were sponsored by conterra GmbH.
Over 150 individuals attended and participated in the various Working Group sessions.
During the meetings, the document "Tiled WMS Discussion Paper" was approved.
In this paper it is explained
how the Web Map Service specification can be extended to allow fast response to a predefined set of tiled maps.
This paper describes two basic operations as proposed extensions to the WMS specification.
The DescribeTiles operation provides the client with a description (i.e, the available layers,
styles, image formats, coordinate systems, scales, sizes and locations) of the image tiles
that are available to be requested from the server.
The GetTile operation provides the client with the ability to request a particular tile.
The difference between the standard GetMap operation and the proposed GetTile operation is
fundamentally one of flexibility versus scalability.
The GetMap operation will continue to exist (as an optionally-supported operation) for those clients that require flexibility over scalability.
This extension is interesting because there a lot of solutions (like Google Maps) which serve tiled data.
The paper should be read in conjunction with the latest version WMS specification.
| 
