Web map server
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A web map server (or a WMS) 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(WFS) 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].