Going beyond maps

We focused on the maps in this book and usually used the WMS protocol in our examples. As you learned in Chapter 1, GIS Fundamentals, a map is a representation of data. A map can include vector or raster data, but it always represents them as a raster output, that is, an image. While maps are an easy and useful way to show your data, there are other scenarios where users need not to use a representation, but the original data, for example, to process the data on a client-side task. Here, two other OGC protocols come into use--WFS and WCS.