Definition
Web services are a specific type of network services that use open internet standards, such as connection and communication through the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), identification using the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), contents specification through the Extensible Markup Language (XML) and Geographic Markup Language (GML), and service descriptions expressed by the Web Services Definition Language (WSDL).
While general web services provide interoperability between systems in different domains, geospatial web services introduce geographic reasoning to the services and go a step further by facilitating cross-institutional interchange of geographic data and services over the internet, and by improving the sharing of geographic resources among a variety of data sources. Thus, geospatial web services can reduce redundant efforts when...