Catalog Service for the Web (CSW)

The Open GeoSpatial Consortium (OGC) Catalog Service defines common interfaces to discover, browse, and query metadata about data, services, and other potential resources.

Bridge publishes the layers metadata to GeoNetwork opensource catalogue, a CSW 2.0.2 compliant server and client, allowing also other CSW compliant clients discover the metadata published in it.

Many organisations, like the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) and the Dutch National Georegistry NGR, use GeoNetwork opensource catalogue to publish their metadata.

Web Map Service (WMS)

Web Map Service is a standard protocol for serving georeferenced map images over the Internet that are generated by a map server using data from a GIS (Geospatial Information System) database. The specification was developed and first published by the Open Geospatial Consortium in 1999.

Layers published as Web Map Services can be viewed by several GIS applications like ESRI ArcMap©, uDig, QGIS or gvSIG. Also web clients developed with javascript map libraries like OpenLayers supports WMS layers.

Bridge extension publishes data layers to GeoServer, a high perfomance compliant WMS 1.1.1 server.

Web Feature Service (WFS)

Web Feature Service provides an interface allowing requests for geographical features across the web using platform-independent calls. One can think of geographical features as the "source code" behind a map.

Layers published as Web Feature Services can be viewed by several GIS applications like ESRI ArcMap©, uDig, QGIS or gvSIG. Also web clients developed with javascript map libraries like OpenLayers supports WFS layers.

GeoServer is also a compliant WFS 1.0 server, publishing the data both as WMS and WFS.

Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD)

Style Layer Descriptor extends WMS to allow user-defined symbolization of feature and coverage data, addressing the need for users and software to be able to control the visual portrayal of the geospatial data.

GeoServer supports SLD 1.0 with custom extensions to produce better renderers, like hatching support, dynamic symbolizers or chart symbolizers.

Bridge produces by default SLD 1.0 renderers using GeoServer extensions. Also the user has the option to create SLD 1.0 without these extensions to publish in other WMS servers that support SLD.

Future versions of Bridge will support 1.1 specification.