The following is an ArcGIS Server news update on Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC)- supported standards and how they can be used:

The ArcGIS Server implementation of the OGC Web Map Service (WMS) standard includes support for the use of Styled Layer Descriptors (SLD). The implementation of the SLD specification allows a publisher to advertise multiple user-selectable styles when generating a map. Users can also create their own styles in an SLD document and task the ArcGIS Server WMS to generate an image based on a user-defined style. The SLD implementation allows greater client-side control of symbology.

Another new feature is the Transactional Web Feature Service (WFS-T), which enables any GIS client that supports WFS-T to carry out transactions against geodatabases using the WFS-T service published by ArcGIS Server. Publishers can also create Web applications that leverage the WFS-T specification, allowing multiple browser-based clients editing access to the Esri geodatabase.

Both the SLD and the Web Feature Server (WFS) implementation of ArcGIS Server can leverage the OGC Filter Encoding (FE) specification. The ArcGIS Server implementation of FE allows SLD-based WMS workflows to apply spatial and attribute filter logic to selectively style relevant features. In the context of ArcGIS software's WFS implementation, FE-based spatial and attribute filters can be used within the queries to request a subset of features from the data store.

ArcGIS Server can publish any raster dataset as OGC WMS, WCS, or KML. Web Coverage Service (WCS) is a data service that enables multispectral pixel values from a raster dataset to be returned to Web applications. The ArcGIS WCS implementation returns data in a multitude of formats—GeoTIFF, NITF, HDF, JPEG, JPEG 2000, and PNG. Applications that can connect to WCS services (including ArcGIS and geoprocessing tools) can then perform analysis on the pixel values.

ArcGIS Server allows users to share maps and data as OGC KML. Map and image services expose a KML network link using the REST pattern. ArcGIS Server map services can also return the results of geoprocessing, geocoding, and query operations as KML. Some of the Esri-supported OGC specifications include WMS, WFS, WCS, KML, CSW, SLD, and FE. A complete list is available on the www.esri.com/standards Web site.

More Information

For more information and new podcasts, visit www.esri.com/standards.

See also "ArcGIS Server Geoportal Extension Manages Geospatial Resources Enterprise-wide."