WMS

"The OpenGIS Web Map Service Interface Standard (WMS) provides a simple HTTP interface for requesting geo-registered map images from one or more distributed geospatial databases. A WMS request defines the geographic layer(s) and area of interest to be processed. The response to the request is one or more geo-registered map images (returned as JPEG, PNG, etc) that can be displayed in a browser application. The interface also supports the ability to specify whether the returned images should be transparent so that layers from multiple servers can be combined or not.

WMS specifies a number of different request types, two of which are required by any WMS server:^[11]

• GetCapabilities - returns parameters about the WMS (such as map image format and WMS version compatibility) and the available layers (map bounding box, coordinate reference systems, URI of the data and whether the layer is mostly opaque or not)
• GetMap - returns a map image. Parameters include: width and height of the map, coordinate reference system, rendering style, image format

Request types that WMS providers may optionally support include:

• GetFeatureInfo - if a layer is marked as 'queryable' then you can request data about a coordinate of the map image.
• DescribeLayer - returns the feature types of the specified layer or layers, which can be further described using WFS or WCS requests. This request is dependent on the SLD Profile of WMS.
• GetLegendGraphic - return an image of the map's legend image, giving a visual guide to map elements.

A WMS server usually serves the map in a bitmap format, e.g. PNG, GIF or JPEG. In addition, vector graphics can be included: such as points, lines, curves and text, expressed in SVG or WebCGM format."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Map_Service

http://www.opengeospatial.org/standards/wms

RELATED SOFTWARE

GDAL - http://www.gdal.org/frmt_wms.html

GeoServer - http://geoserver.org/

MapProxy - https://mapproxy.org/

Mapserver - http://www.mapserver.org/

OSGeo - https://live.osgeo.org/en/standards/wms_overview.html

OWSLib - https://geopython.github.io/OWSLib/

sci-wms - http://sci-wms.github.io/sci-wms/

TileCache - http://tilecache.org/