The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international organization that produces open standards for geospatial services, content, processing, and sharing. Address Registry web services are published according to one of the following two OGC standards:

 

Web Feature Service (WFS)

The WFS standard provides an protocol for requesting vector-based features and their associated attribute information from a geospatial vector layer. A WFS request consists of methods, and the parameters for each method. The two most important WFS methods are: 

 

--- GetCapabilites: provides the user with a list of available geospatial vector layers and how to query them.

--- GetFeature: retrieves the vector features of a geospatial layer. 

 

The WFS standard also provides a convention for how the vector features are returned by the web service, namely in GML (Geographic Markup Language) format, which is an XML standard for conveying geographic data.

 

Web Map Service (WMS)

The WMS standard provides a protocol for requesting pre-rendered and geo-referenced map tiles in the form of image files. A WMS request defines the geographic features (i.e. layers) and area of interest to be processed. The response to the request is one or more geo-referenced map tiles in graphic (i.e. raster) format, which can be displayed in a web browser application. The WMS protocol also supports the ability to specify whether the returned images should be transparent so that layers from multiple servers can be combined or not.

 

A standard convention exists for the structure of a web service UML request. Below is the description of the syntax structure convention for the findAddresses web service request, according the the following example:

 

http://geoportal.rks-gov.net/services/ariswebservicesopen.asmx/findAddresses?SearchString=Mentor%20Tolaj&TopRecords=1

 

Syntax description	Syntax example
Prefix of service operation	http://geoportal.rks-gov.net/services/ariswebservicesopen.asmx
Web service name	findAddresses
Denotes start of parameter list	?
First request parameter: insert address or part of address to be searched for	SearchString=Mentor Tolaj
Denotes separation between parameters	&
Second request parameter: insert number of records to be returned	TopRecords=5

 

Below are the technical details of the various Address Registry web services currently available via the Geoportal: