A review of the implementation of OGC Web Services across Europe

摘要

This paper presents the results of an investigation conducted in the spring of 2010 to review the availability across Europe of public Web services conforming to the standard specifications issued by the Open Geospatial Consortium. The descriptive and statistical analysis of 6,544 geospatial network services might provide insight into the current level of implementation of these services in Europe. These services were discovered with the help of a focused crawler able to discover access points to public geospatial network services. This crawler relies on general-purpose search engines for finding seed URLs related with geospatial network services from which begin crawling. The work also identifies potential limitations and data biases derived from the methodology. Nevertheless, this kind of strategy might open up new opportunities to complement SDI implementation assessments when exhaustive, periodic and up to date monitoring is required.