Introduction

About This Document

This document covers the concepts of Web Map Tile Service (WMTS), Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC®) standards for WMTS, capabilities of WMTS, and ways to integrate WMTS in GIS-based custom application development.

Target Audience

This document is designed to help developers of GIS-based custom application development. Developers unfamiliar with WMTS can read about the WMTS framework, capabilities, integration procedures and development best practices to design methods for creating innovative world-class GIS applications.

What is WMTS?

The OGC WMTS Implementation Standard provides an interface to serve digital Maps using predefined image Tiles. The WMTS standard complements the existing Web Map Service (WMS) standard of the OGC. Imagery is always returned in relation to the world-wide grid and the grid is unique per projection, requiring the clients to create a mosaic of tiles obtained from the server and then clip the set of tiles into a final image.

Definition of a Tile

The tile resource is generally a rectangular image containing cartographic data. Alternatively, this resource might be a non-image representation of the tile such as a description of the tile or a link to the actual image. For example, the tile resource could be a KML document used in a super-overlay, or a tile metadata document. When returning an image tile, a full single tile is always returned. Also, the background pixels of a tile should be transparent when possible so that the client can overlay the tiles on top of other map data (possibly other tiles).

References

  • http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards
  • http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/WMTS
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIS#OGC_standards
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_information_system
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_Markup_Language