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Many of us have struggled to get a list of GIS services that are available on the internet. Specifically map services that expose OGC based interfaces like WMS, WFS or Web Service interfaces like REST, SOAP etc.

For instance, just for oceanic and marine data there are several online catalogs such as
1) FDGC
2) NOAA NowCoast
3) IMO Mest
4) NASA

If you start with weather, transportation, demographics, agriculture, this list becomes huge!

These sites are not easy to use, don't have the most updated info and don't have a good taxonomy/ classification of services towards easy discovery of such services.

Is there a better attempt out there to create an exhaustive, searchable catalog of all such services? I would like to know their usage rights, free or pay etc. Uptime, performance etc. would also be nice to know.

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GeoNetwork Opensource and the Esri Geoportal Server are two open source and free technologies that can be used to build Catalog Services for spatial information, and are both a great start.

However, I think both could do with more work on usability.

For example, Catalog Services from the Esri Geoportal Server can be accessed from ArcGIS for Desktop to discover OGC WMS services. There is also an open source CSW Client to have ArcGIS for Desktop bind to and display those WMS services that has been shown to work at Is there public OGC Catalog Service (CSW) available which lets ArcGIS for Desktop with CSW Client Add (WMS) To Map?.

On top of technological issues there are of course administrative issues around who can afford to create and maintain a comprehensive catalog of OGC and other GIS web services. I suspect such a Catalog will need to be a federation of catalogs rather than a centalised monolith.

As an aside, I posted an ArcGIS Idea recently to encourage Esri to Publish public test URLs for each OGC web service supported by ArcGIS but it is yet to take off.

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The free WMS, WFS, WMTS and Esri Rest MapServer search engine Spatineo Directory has recently moved into it's own sub-site http://directory.spatineo.com/

As already mentioned, it's especially useful to developers looking for reliable spatial web services due to current status and historical availability statistics for each service. There are currently more than 30 000 services listed with almost 700 000 layers or provided feature types listed.

Disclaimer: I'm the CTO and one of the founders of Spatineo.

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The best search engine for WMS and other OGC web services I found so far is http://spatineo.com.

It works like a google search for geospatial web services. The main advantage of spatineo.com is that it shows info about the service status (this is very important information because many WMS servers are down and the WMS URLs often change). It also provides info if the service has any access restrictions (like "only for registered users")

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GeoSeer seems to be exactly what you want.

https://www.geoseer.net - at the time of writing it has over 750,000 distinct spatial layers indexed and searchable - WMS, WFS, WCS and WMTS.

It only includes services that were active at the last crawl, so working around the linkrot problem.

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If you're thinking of something like a Google for GIS web services then you might want to check out OWS Search Engine.

OWS Search Engine looks for web sevices implementing OGC specifications such as WMS, WMTS, WFS, WCS, WPS, SOS, SAS, SPS and CSW. Additional information about these standards are available on the OGC web site.

If you really want a list then be sure to check Skylab Mobilesystem's list though it is by no means exhaustive and it only covers WMS servers.

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  • OWS says "Your request could not be process correctly due to an unexpected error encountered while trying to connect to Yahoo! Search BOSS. Please try later." -- hopefully a tempory aberration
    – matt wilkie
    Commented Oct 3, 2012 at 5:31
  • Yes, OWS also states that their service is going to be taken down soon as Yahoo has started charging for searches. May be that is why it's down...
    – Ramesh Elaiyavalli
    Commented Oct 3, 2012 at 13:53
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    I did run into Skylab before, but their links are all dead, and their new URL does not work either.
    – Ramesh Elaiyavalli
    Commented Oct 3, 2012 at 14:02
  • I was not aware of OWS Search. It's a shame that it now appears defunct because it sounds like it would be very useful.
    – PolyGeo ♦
    Commented Oct 4, 2012 at 3:58
  • @Ramesh Sorry about that. Wasn't able to test it.
    – R.K.
    Commented Oct 4, 2012 at 3:59
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Just to mention it: Mapmatters.org provides exactly what you want. You can easily search for specific titles or tags and it has a nice preview function.

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You can use Open Data Network (ODN) Catalog like VoyagerODN. It is a public open data portal which offer a single, searchable geospatial catalog of global content. VoyagerODN provides an online search to help individuals and organizations to find, share, use and collaborate on a variety of content such as climate change, Parcel/Property Data, Transportation, Endangered Species, and so on. See Finding Geospatial Data Faster and Easier with ODN Platform

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