Web map server

A web map server is a web application which provides portrayal of geographic data which is stored on the server. This data can be stored in a variety of data formats but is served in a limited number of image formats.

This provides the useful ability to restrict access to data since only a picture of the data is sent to the user and the high quality vector or raster data remains safe on the server. This is sharp contrast to a Web Feature Server which returns the features of the data as features.

The web map server specification is defined by the [Open GIS Consortium] and can be found at [1].