Public site WMS bounding box seems wrong

Question

I'm having an issue with several WMS feeds that i'm looking at, where their bounding box seems wrong. I think i would assume the issue is with the provider, but there are multiple enough that i think that maybe the problem is with how i'm interpreting the data?

For example, take http://inspirepub.waterinfo.be/arcgis/services/risicokaarten/MapServer/WMSServer?SERVICE=WMS&REQUEST=Getcapabilities

if you look at the top level layer, the bounding box is:

<BoundingBox CRS="EPSG:4326" minx="50.638080" miny="2.539990" maxx="51.505965" maxy="5.936689"/>

which looks like the following image

which is the small grey box off the east coast of africa. I have the same problem withe these other three sites, all independent of each other:

https://geoservices.informatievlaanderen.be/raadpleegdiensten/GRB/wms?SERVICE=WMS&REQUEST=Getcapabilities

https://mercator.vlaanderen.be/raadpleegdienstenmercatorpubliek/tn/tn:tn_refpt_awv/wms?SERVICE=WMS&REQUEST=Getcapabilities

http://geo.gent.be/geoserver/wms?SERVICE=WMS&REQUEST=Getcapabilities

These all have the '.be' domain so i assume they should be in, or at least near belgium. Am i reading the data wrong here? Or is there something else going on that i don't understand?

Answer 1

You are reading the longitude and latitude in wrong order from the EPSG:4326 BoundingBox. If you read the whole response from that server you should notice that WMS version 1.3.0 tries to give this information explicitly with the GeographicBoundingBox so that users would not need to know the official axis order of each CRS. WMS 1.3.0 also recommends to show the CRS:84 bounding box which is the same as EPSG:4326 but with longitude-latitude axis order.

<EX_GeographicBoundingBox>
<westBoundLongitude>2.539990</westBoundLongitude>
<eastBoundLongitude>5.936689</eastBoundLongitude>
<southBoundLatitude>50.638080</southBoundLatitude>
<northBoundLatitude>51.505965</northBoundLatitude>
</EX_GeographicBoundingBox>
<BoundingBox CRS="CRS:84" minx="2.539990" miny="50.638080" maxx="5.936689" maxy="51.505965"/>
<BoundingBox CRS="EPSG:4326" minx="50.638080" miny="2.539990" maxx="51.505965" maxy="5.936689"/>
<BoundingBox CRS="EPSG:3857" minx="282750.376029" miny="6557522.159667" maxx="660869.210327" maxy="6711285.878825"/>
<BoundingBox CRS="EPSG:102100" minx="282750.376029" miny="6557522.159667" maxx="660869.210327" maxy="6711285.878825"/>
<BoundingBox CRS="EPSG:31370" minx="20733.769332" miny="147431.828672" maxx="260998.994426" maxy="245548.161006"/>