From the course: Real-World GIS (2014)

Connecting a client to a GIS server - ArcGIS Tutorial

From the course: Real-World GIS (2014)

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Connecting a client to a GIS server

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Now let's talk more about the client to server connection in depth. Every GIS service published on an arc GIS server, is considered a resource. Whenever a service is published on the server, there's a corresponding directory of that service, or services, that are available through a URL. In this case, the main format of the URL looks like this. Where we have a host name, a forward slash, arc GIS, another forward slash, rest, and then services. An example of this we've already seen, is gis.calvin.edu. Let's go there now, I'll jump over to my browser and put that in. Here we are in the browser, and here are their ArcGIS rest services directory, that I'm serving at calvin.edu. Here are all the folders and when we click into the folders, we can see the services that are currently being served by the ArcGIS server. Now in general, the URL like this were it ends in service name, is what we call the Rest Service End Point. Check out lynda.com's course on Foundations of Programming Web Services, for more about Rest Services. Now let's go back to the Rest Services directory, at gis.calvin.edu. I've navigated down to the CCEP map service. In this case, you can see all of the layers that are being served by in this case, the spacial description or the service description. This map reference is the Calvin Ecosystem Reserve because of the rest architectural style, we can pull this data directly into different places. And we've already done that when we connected to gis.calvin.edu for arc.gis in arc catalog, recall that with me now. Let's jump over to ArcMap and open this up there, and compare these two places. Here in ArcMap we're going to catalog, and then to GIS servers, and we're going to add an ArcGIS server, just like we did before. Now that's been added to my catalogue, I can view arc gis.calvin.edu. Notice this file structure is exactly the same as the rest services directly, when we go back there, we'll see the same structure. Okay, so here I have on the left my internet browser and on the right our catalogue shown. And notice they're exactly the same, the two file structures. Most universities, colleges and government agencies, allow the public to see their REST services. In a simple search for RGIS/REST/Services, and the theme that you're looking for, will often yield some great results. For example, let's do that with weather. Here I'm going to open up my browser, so you can see everything I'm doing. And I'll make a search for RGIS, REST, services and weather. I'll hit enter and see what we get, looks like we have a lot options to choose from, let's choose the first one. Here is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, REST services directory. This is one quick way to begin a search for services, that you can pull right into AGIS, and begin to build greater geospatial capacity.

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