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.
Best Answer
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.