As you've completed the walkthroughs, you've hopefully begun to think about ways that you could serve your own term project data as a WMS. You are not required to use a WMS in your term project, but I would like you to get some more practice with it using your own data. If you like the result, you're welcome to use it in your term project submission.
The assignment this week has two parts:
- Find a public-facing WMS that we have not used in this class, and post a review on the Lesson 4 assignment (part 1) forum on Canvas. Please note that you should write about a public WMS and not about a web map that uses data from a WMS. The review should include the following:
- the URL for the WMS;
- the organization that published the WMS and what technology they used (if you can figure that out);
- a description of the layers available in the WMS (what you learned in section "Basics of the WMS specification" may help you obtain information about the layers);
- a critique of the styling in the WMS and how it might be improved using the approaches in this lesson.
- Using GeoServer and the techniques learned in this lesson, serve some of your term project data as a WMS. This can be a single layer or a group layer, but it should use custom styling that goes beyond the GeoServer default style. Assemble a word processor document with a report containing the following and submit it to the Lesson 4 (part 2) drop box:
- a description of the layer you served;
- a screenshot of the layer(s) in the GeoServer layer list;
- a description of how you made the style;
- a screenshot of the style page in GeoServer (including as much of the SLD code as possible);
- a screenshot of the WMS displayed in the OpenLayers preview;
Above & beyond: Successful delivery of the above requirements is sufficient to earn 90% on this assignment. The remaining 10% is reserved for efforts that go "above & beyond" the minimum requirements. For this, browse through the examples from the SLD Cookbook and adapt an approach described there (but not detailed in the lesson materials!) to achieve some advanced styling of your data by manually editing the SLD code. Make sure you mention what you did for above & beyond points in the document you submit.