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Does anyone know of an "almost always available" service URL for a public facing Web Map Tiling Service (WMTS)?

I'm keen to test WMTS client capabilities without having to configure a WMTS server.

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4 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

take a look at http://data.wien.gv.at/katalog/wmts.html (see download wtms metadaten)

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I've awarded Kurt the points because his answer arrived 2 mins before Chris' - both appear to have provided public facing WMTS service URLs. I was able to display this WMTS using the first WMTS client I tested. – PolyGeo Aug 20 '12 at 5:14
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Kartverket offers all their cached services as WMTS

http://opencache.statkart.no/gatekeeper/gk/gk.open_wmts?Version=1.0.0&service=wmts&request=getcapabilities (Human readable GetCapabilities document)

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Thanks @relet - I just did a quick test and this WMTS worked for me with ArcGIS for Desktop 10.1 SP1. – PolyGeo Apr 20 at 23:26
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You can find a public APOLLO imagery WMTS available here. The previous answer was somewhat negative ... you can consider this an "always on" service

The service is compliant to the OGC Team engine test suite but note;

  1. The image tiles returned are generated on the fly with no server-side caching. The server is located in Atlanta, GA
  2. To improve performance of web clients, the server can be aliased against iws.erdas.com, iws2.erdas.com and iws3.erdas.com to workaround concurrency limits
  3. it does not implement some of the optional components such as the REST interface (KVP only) or feature info
  4. ESRI ArcGIS for Desktop 10.1 has a major bug in its WMTS client implementation that will mean no tiles will drawn with the service. This is a bug with ESRI and the way it issues KVP requests, specifically the format param
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Many thanks Chris - I have upvoted your answer because, although it came in 2 mins after Kurt's, it too points at a public WMTS service URL. I was able to reproduce the no display of APOLLO WMTS from ArcGIS 10.1 issue and will defer to your knowledge of optional/mandatory elements of the WMTS specification. – PolyGeo Aug 20 '12 at 5:23
The iws.erdas.com and iws3.erdas.com links are now 404. iws2.erdas.com seems OK. – BradHards Nov 16 '12 at 4:03
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OpenLayers points to a City of Vienna WMTS server.

Let the lack of always-on WMTS servers be evidence (along with always-on WMS servers) be a guiding factor in your decision to go with it; it's less popular than XYZ, can, like WMS be hard to maintain, and is rarely implemented to completion with its XML nonsense. If you want web client support, the slippy map tilenames doc is the way to go (supported by MapQuest/MapBox/OpenStreetMap/etc), not anything remotely related to the OGC.

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Thanks tmcw but in this case OGC is a requirement so I won't be able to use the slippy map route. However, if you were able to provide me with the service URL of the City of Vienna WMTS service (to reach its GetCapabilities) rather than a web client URL to a map that consumes it then that would certainly answer my question. – PolyGeo Aug 20 '12 at 3:36
Okay then, v2.suite.opengeo.org/geoserver/gwc/service/wmts/… – tmcw Aug 20 '12 at 13:09
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If you implement WMTS with a restful interface, then the resulting urls look exactly like slippy map ones, eg, server/service/style/layer/scale/row/col.png. However, slippy maps forces you to use spherical mercator and fixed zoom levels, which means easier maths and no config, but at a cost of less flexibility. If you want to use a more accurate projected coordinate system, such as one a national mapping agency might use, and you want to define scale levels such as 1:250, 1:500, 1:1250, etc, then WMTS allows this -- sure, XML config is a pain, but you have to define your service somehow. – John Powell Feb 5 at 7:57
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Also, I fail to see how restful WMTS is any harder to maintain than XYZ, seeing as both are a direct one-to-one mapping from url to resource? – John Powell Feb 5 at 7:59

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