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Many Web services that are useful to the Biodiversity community are registered in the Biodiversity Catalogue (http://biodiversitycatalogue.org) where they are described, monitored, curated, and discovered by scientists wishing to make use of them. Web services traditionally adhere to the generic API (Application Program Interface) protocols of either SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) or REST (REpresentational State Transfer) which are both supported in the Biodiversity Catalogue. There has been an increase in the use of more specific API protocols for geographic Web services within the Biodiversity science community. A common use case in the Biodiversity sciences is to present maps annotated with geographic location data. These are often used for such activities as tracking specimen occurrence, species distributions, and ecological niche modelling.

A widely adopted protocol for Georeferenced Map Services is called the WMS (Web Map Service) protocol, which was first released in 2000 by the OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium).

This protocol contains a pre-defined set of methods that clients can use to interface with a map server. These include an investigatory method to retrieve the capabilities of the server called ‘getCapabilities’, as well as other methods that allow the client to fully configure a map request; such as the maps window size, location co-ordinates, features, layers, legends, and file format. These available configuration options are all returned in the getCapabilities method along with descriptive metadata and example implementations (in a well configured WMS).

The Biodiversity Catalogue has implemented new features to support the registration of WMSs in the registry. Users can register the ‘getCapabilities’ function of a Web service. The Biodiversity Catalogue then requests, retrieves, and displays all the service’s available functionality and supported parameters. The WMS description can be automatically updated on a nightly basis to account for any changes to the service over time. WMS services can also be annotated, monitored, and curated in the same way other Web services in the Biodiversity Catalogue can.