I'm a complete beginner in the world of GIS. And I've been wondering: how do I know where a WMS is, and what layers there are that I can import into my map?
To make it a bit more concrete: I just found the wonderful OpenLayers tutorial here. In this tutorial we import a layer from a WMS by coding:
var vectorLayer = new ol.layer.Tile({
source: new ol.source.TileWMS({
preload: Infinity,
url: 'http://felek.cns.umass.edu:8080/geoserver/wms',
serverType:'geoserver',
params:{ 'LAYERS':"Streams:Developed",
'TILED':true}
})
});
Now this works fine, and surely is done like that in lots of tutorials.
However, what I couldn't find on any tutorial I've seen, is how do we actually know about the data we are importing? The above example assumes that we know that there is a WMS behind the url http://felek.cns.umass.edu:8080/geoserver/wms
, that we are dealing with a GeoServer
and not, for instance, with a MapServer
, and, most amazingly, that we know that there is a layer called Developed
in the Streams
workspace on that server.
Surely there is something that I am missing. Where does one get all that information? I couldn't find it on the wesites of WMS-providers like this one.