5 Using ESRI software to serve OneGeology web services
A number of organizations have set up WMS’ for OneGeology using ESRI software rather than the MapServer setup described and supplied in the original WMS Cookbook. This is understandable as many of the world’s geological surveys have ESRI software as the corporate standard and they would like if possible to use the same software suite to serve OGC WMS’ and WFS’.
However the quite basic OGC conformant functionality required for OneGeology purposes is limited in current versions of ESRI ArcIMS and ESRI ArcGIS Server. ESRI-USA inform us that there will be no further significant development in the OGC WMS capabilities of ArcIMS - all further OGC focussed improvements, including feedback from the OneGeology initiative, will take place in future version of ArcGIS Server as we understand it. Several OneGeology participants have worked with the OneGeology secretariat and the OneGeology Portal staff to try and get this software to contribute usefully to OneGeology goals and we now have some useful implementation notes from those organizations to share with others who need to use this route. See the ArcGIS server or ArcIMS server sections below for notes on the respective platforms.
Unless otherwise noted, the following notes are based on ESRI ArcIMS version 9.3.1 and ESRI ArcGIS server version 10 (SP1)
Section last modified: 12 June 2013