Web Map Service (WMS) Tutorial

Web Map Service (WMS) was created by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to “provide a simple HTTP interface for requesting geo-registered map images from one or more distributed geospatial databases.” To translate: WMS allows users to type a special kind of URL, called a WMS request, into their browser. This request gets sent to a WMS server, which is essentially a computer that stores a lot of maps. The server sends a map back to the user, in the format specified by the request.