<div class="pf-content">I am more the offline data user but when it comes to the question “Where can I get my data from?”, Web Feature Services (WFS) are a great way to share your data with others. So where to find your WFS data? What catalogs are there? Follow me an find out. I will try a search for WFS services with the keyword “Nigeria” and the spatial extent of the country. So let us start with it. Spatineo
Spatineo is a Finnish company and they
Directory map of Spatineo
The catalog returned 60 results for my keyword “Nigeria”. Each result has a seperate page with further information of the service. Take a special look on the “Service health” as it shows you, how reliable the service is offered. Unfortunately no real “spatial” search is offered. You can limit your search results by countries which is a different approach.Furthermore they offer a so called service map which shows services and their quality:
servicemap by Spatineo for Europe
GeoNetwork
Once it was installed you can use the application not only to search and discover WFS/WMS but also to manage those services by adding your own services, use keywords and harvest meta data.
Geoclub or as it is named “WFS Geodata Catalog” is a project of <a href="http://moenk.de/">Thomas M
Spatineo is a Finnish company and they
offer easy-to-use SaaS products for improving the use and usability of spatial web service technologies for both public and commercial uses.
But probably one of the coolest things is their directory:
Directory map of SpatineoThe catalog returned 60 results for my keyword “Nigeria”. Each result has a seperate page with further information of the service. Take a special look on the “Service health” as it shows you, how reliable the service is offered. Unfortunately no real “spatial” search is offered. You can limit your search results by countries which is a different approach.Furthermore they offer a so called service map which shows services and their quality:
servicemap by Spatineo for EuropeGeoNetwork
GeoNetwork is a catalog application to manage spatially referenced resources. It provides powerful metadata editing and search functions as well as an interactive web map viewer.
Actually GeoNetwork is not a catalog but more a tool with a catalog inside. You need to download and install it (via GitHub, yeah!). As it is programmed in JAVA (make sure to use Maven for the line mvn clean install it will probably work on all major OS. Yet it is not a one-click installer and I had several issues installing it (make sure to have JDK installed and a lot of coffee available as about a trillion files will be downloaded and the whole process took me two days!…).Once it was installed you can use the application not only to search and discover WFS/WMS but also to manage those services by adding your own services, use keywords and harvest meta data.
Harvesting is the process of ingesting metadata from remote sources and storing it locally in the catalog for fast searching. It is a scheduled process, so local copy and remote metadata are kept aligned.
The whole application is for advanced users only but there are some tutorials on it. Still, this looks like the one fits all solutions as you can create an own catalog very easily. The search is only effective if you have imported own lists/xml files of WFS/WMS servers or you harvested from other systems.Click to view slideshow.GeoClubGeoclub or as it is named “WFS Geodata Catalog” is a project of <a href="http://moenk.de/">Thomas M