Spatineo monitoring agent network sends each publicly available Spatial Web Service a lightweight test request every 5 minutes. In total over 7 million availability measurements are collected daily. The same data stream is also used to drive the near real-time Quality of Service reporting and alerting system of Spatineo Monitor. The monthly service availability figures are aggregated from all successful and failed test requests for each country and their first-order administrative areas.
As we have collected these open data samples from 2012 onwards, we finally reached the 50 000 services milestone! On average we gathered 27.4 new services each day and during almost exactly five years we have been able to discover all existing and new open spatial web services.
The ones we have discovered are open-data sources, so when considering these numbers you have to keep it in your mind that these open-data services are only a part of the spatial data out there. Some services are hidden or disabled from the public.
First and 50 000th service
As we started to gather services to our monitoring list, the first open-data source we found was Kartta.Suomi.fi. It had 12 layers at that time and was typed as Web Map Service (WMS). This address was found on the 10th of April 2012.
Five years later, as we had discovered approximately 10 000 services per year, we discovered the 50 000th service! That honor belongs to Destatis, Homepage of the Federal Statistical Office of Germany. It’s a funny coincide that the 50 000th service was found in Germany, as they are hosting this year’s INSPIRE Conference! On the 11th of April, we discovered over 300 services from Destasis.
Facts and numbers
Within the 50 000 services we are monitoring, there are some reoccurring numbers to be seen. Out of all the services monitored, over 25% of them have 2 data layers. The biggest number of data layers can be found on the WorldMap of Harvard University, over 23 000 layers.
WMS or WFS?
When inspecting what type of services we have collected to our database, we discovered that there are couple of dominating types.
So far, the most common service type is WMS. This is the standard of the industry but when we reach the milestone of 100 000 services, can the situation be different? The other dominant type was Web Feature Service (WFS). It has the second largest cut with 27% of the services we monitor.
Differences between countries?
Some countries have more public spatial data than others. Most common country domains on our list were the ones below, with following (approximate) number of services each:
- Germany 12 000
- France 6 000
- Spain 3 000
- Italy 2 500
- Belgium 2 000
Apart from obvious country domains, there were several services with .edu and .net domains and if counting these accordingly, the Unites States would be ranked second, tieing with France, with about 6 000 services.
Availability of the services
Current availability of services in different countries and their administrative areas can be checked from Spatineo Service Map. It gives up-to-date data on both availability and services as well trends over the previous years.
More detailed information for each service can be viewed from Spatineo Directory.
