Introduction
Discover the first mapping server on the market to spare users the tedious task of preparing data. Unlike traditional mapping servers, the Luciad Web Services Suite™ directly accesses geographical raster and vector data without data transformation.
The Luciad Web Services Suite™ runs in an application server environment independent of the data tier and the client tier. This enables it to merge on-the-fly geo-data from multiple sources stored in different formats and with diverse geo-references.
The Luciad Web Services Suite™ provides a web service to retrieve metadata about specific geo-data sources. The Luciad Web Services Suite™ also provides services to integrate geo-data into a coherent pictorial format, such as PNG, GIF or JPEG, or into vector-based graphical elements in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), OGC Geographical Markup Language (GML), or even Shockwave Flash (SWF).
OGC Compliant

Users can access the Luciad Web Services Suite™ via a series of open standard protocols defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). These protocols allow any client on the Web to request mapping services without knowing the details of the actual server implementation. Via the OGC protocols users can rapidly access, integrate, and visualize information from different OGC compliant servers.

The Luciad Web Services Suite™ offers a Web Map Server (WMS 1.3), a transactional Web Feature Server (WFS 1.1), and a Web Coverage Server (WCS 1.0).

- The WMS is a map rendering service. It delivers a raster map, possibly combining data from multiple data sources, in the format and projection of choice.
- The WFS is a data retrieval and update service. It delivers filtered geographical content in the standard GML format. With a transactional WFS, clients can insert, update and delete data on the server. For such changes, the use of GML by the WFS encapsulates the actual data store and improves interoperability.
- The WCS is a coverage production service. It delivers geographically referenced raster and matrix data over the Web in the standard GeoTIFF or JPEG2000 format.

Multiple data formats and database support
The Luciad Web Services Suite™ can directly access data stored in multiple file formats and data servers. This is the result of direct data decoding combined with high-performance on-the-fly transformation between different geographical references. The services of the Luciad Web Services Suite™ warp and overlay raster images with vector data. The result: a geographically precise map in one of the supported output formats (e.g., JPEG, GIF, PNG, GeoTIFF, JPEG2000, GML, SVG, SWF).
The services of the Luciad Web Services Suite™ can handle data input from all commonly used file formats, and directly support Oracle Spatial. Users can define layers of data based on arbitrary SQL queries that access relational databases such as Microsoft SQL Server, Informix, and Oracle.
Multiple client types

The Luciad Web Services Suite™ can work with a wide range of client types.
  • An HTML client typically consists of an HTML page containing a Web map in GIF or JPEG format. Developers can supplement the HTML page with JavaScript, enabling users to interact with the map and carry out simple operations such as rubber band zooming and panning. The Luciad Web Services Suite™ can produce a clickable map that displays attribute information when users click on a map feature.
  • An SVG/Flash/GML/PDF client is built from a standard plug-in, running in any Web browser that supports formats such as Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), Shockwave Flash format (SWF) or OGC GML, or PDF. The plug-in renders the map and enables users to zoom, pan and re-center. As SVG, GML and SWF are vector-based formats, they allow high quality rendering at all scales. By embedding SVG into PDF, the Web Map Service can produce portable documents including maps that can be viewed and controlled using Adobe Acrobat Reader™.
  • A LuciadMap™ client solution consists of a LuciadMap™-based application or a LuciadMap™-based applet running in a Web browser. Configured this way, the Luciad Web Services Suite™ generates the base map of the applet. Users can overlay this base map with static or dynamic data from sources such as real-time data links, GPS devices or any static storage. This hybrid approach makes it easy for users to interact with data that is layered on top of rich background maps.
Advanced rendering and labeling
The Luciad Web Services Suite™ uses scalable symbols, transparent strokes and fill patterns to generate high quality thematic maps from vector data. A single layer can display different types of roads -highways, regional and local roads, for example- with unique line styles and colors. The user can define the visual portrayal of geographical information, by taking advantage of the Styled Layer Descriptor (OGC SLD V1.0), supported by the Luciad Web Services Suite.
Advanced labeling algorithms position labels in the visible portion of the map and avoid overlap. Users can render labels to follow curved lines for improved readability. Advanced raster rendering allows, e.g., the use of specific raster color models.
Extensible via LuciadMap

The Luciad Web Services Suite™ is built on LuciadMap™, a toolkit for handling high performance spatial data. The LuciadMap™ product Application Programming Interface (API) provides the following options for customizing and extending the services of the Luciad Web Services Suite™, and for integrating the services of Luciad Web Services Suite™ in any LuciadMap™ application.

- The LuciadMap™ OGC Web Server Suite API enables developers to customize and add specific functionality to the WMS, WFS and WCS services. Users can add proprietary data formats by implementing a LuciadMap™ decoder and integrating it in the Luciad Web Services Suite™ . By incorporating specific LuciadMap™ painters and layers, users can customize rendering, thus making it possible to serve maps based on any data source.

- The LuciadMap™ OGC Web Client Suite API enables developers to easily request geodata from WMS, WFS and WCS services, and to integrate the result in a LuciadMap™ application, without having to deal with the details of the underlying OGC protocol.
Out-of-the box installation and user-friendly configuration
The Luciad Web Services Suite™ installs out of the box on any application server and ships with a user-friendly configuration tool, which stores your configuration in an XML file on the application server.
The configuration tool enables users to define the locations and properties of geo-data sources. The WMS of the Luciad Web Services Suite™ can repeatedly group layers of data into logical themes. Users can set layer properties such as scale ranges, line style and symbology, label fonts size and color.
Multi-platform
The Luciad Web Services Suite™ is 100 percent Java. It runs on all standard Web environments and application servers that support the J2EE servlet container specification (such as IBM Websphere, BEA WebLogic, JBOSS). Users can also configure the Luciad Web Services Suite™as servlets running on a servlet engine such as Tomcat or JRun. As such, the Luciad Web Services Suite™ can run on Microsoft Windows and Linux servers.
Unlimited scalability
The Luciad Web Services Suite™ is designed to serve hundreds of simultaneous client connections efficiently on a single server. Via multi-threading, the Luciad Web Services Suite™ manages multiple processors in real time, each thread serving multiple users. Intelligent caching and raster tiling minimize wait time, while optimizing memory, disk and CPU use. In combination with high-performance application servers, the Luciad Web Services Suite™ scales to any number of concurrent users by increasing the number of physical servers and server CPUs. Through the Luciad Web Services Suite™ all clients can retrieve the specific data that they need, even from large geo-data stores, thus limiting the required bandwidth.