Identify geographic web services¶

The first step in the process of documenting services is to identify them.

How automatic service pre-documentation works¶

The capabilities of geographic services are automatically analyzed to document the metadata sheet. All you have to do is submit the GetCapabilities URL to Isogeo, which then extracts all the relevant information.

Prerequisites¶

• the "Allow manual creation of metadata records" option must be enabled;
• getCapabilities URLs (or ESRI equivalents) for compatible and available services.

Ideally, services are accessible to the public, or at least via the *.isogeo.com domains in SaaS mode.

Identify a service accessible via Isogeo¶

For this example, WMS and WFS services for Corine Land Cover data are used.

GetCapabilities overview
WMS
WFS

1. In the inventory, click the + Create button;
2. In the form, select a service form;

3. Paste the GetCapabilities URL of the service to be scanned(see URL syntaxes): if the URL is correctly formatted and the service reachable, its format is automatically proposed;

   

4. By clicking on Create, the service is "scanned":

Recovered metadata
Title, Abstract, Keywords, Format
Contact (if email address present)
Format, version and available operations ( Advanced tab)
Available layers ( Resources tab)

The service is now documented. Now it's time toassociate the listed layers with the inventoried datasets.

Register a private service ¶

Geographic service capacities are nothing more and nothing less than standardized files (XML for OGC services, JSON for Esri services). It is therefore possible to import them from the interface.

1. Download the capacity file from its URL. For example for Esri services :

   1. On the service page, right-click on the JSON link

      

   2. Save as JSON (depending on your browser, make sure the extension is not forced to .txt)

      

2. Create the service form by entering the basic URL and format: click on Create, ignoring the red message indicating that the service cannot be reached;

3. Once the file has been created, click on Modify and then on Import capacities;
4. Select the capacity file and click on Import;
5. Close the confirmation modal and reload the page: service metadata now available in Isogeo.

Note that this process must be repeated each time the service is updated

Here's how it works in pictures:

Manual layer census for a service ¶

If you wish to document a service that does not meet the prerequisites, it is possible to enter the data manually. After creating the file, simply click on + Add a layer and enter its identifier (mandatory) and a title (optional).

Assign unique identifiers to the layers of your Esri services ¶

To make it easier to update your Esri service files, we recommend that you fix the layer identifiers in the project with which you publish the service. This prevents layer identifiers from being modified when you reverse the order of layers in your project.

This means you won't have to redo the data associations in your service sheets if a new layer is added to the project, as it won't take an identifier from an existing layer. This also allows you to easily update the service file by adding the new layer manually.

To do this, simply check the Allow unique digital IDs for web layer sharing box in the project's map properties (see Esri Documentation).