Starting in 1994 the Open Geospatial Consortium Inc. (OGC) has established a number of standards for geospatial data formats and services. Mainly the Web Map Service has become essential for the exchange of geospatial data through the web. Worldwide there exist thousands of services offering data with manifold thematic content.

The WMS is also part of many official regulations for the delivery of geospatial content within governmental organizations and from governments to the public (e.g. INSPIRE in Europe).

With mapmatters.org we add important aspects to the usability of this valuable but hardly manageable source of geospatial information.

mapmatters has cataloged far more than 1000 WMS services. Through text search and search by geoographical extent the users may easily find layers of interest. Each layer can be previewed on a map or with precompiled thumbnails.

In addition to the catalogue mapmatters allows to assess performance and reliability of a WMS. For many layers information is available, how long it takes to download maps from the service and how many times a request failed. If a layer shows no up-to-date statistics the user may explicitly start monitoring the service.

mapmatters is on the one hand a tool for the end-user to find exactly the WMS that fits the needs of a specific application with respect to the thematic contents and the required technical quality. On the other hand it is a tool for the person in charge of a service to track how well the service performs from the outside and to quickly be notified in case of failure.

mapmatters is currently in a beta stage and will be extended continously. Feel free to send comments and questions to info@mapmatters.org.

mapmatters.org is a project by