Title (Goal): Create a web map service optimized for public consumption

Primary Actor: Dan, a GIS data manager.

Scope: Dan, a GIS data manager working in a science-based federal department, is preparing a web map service for general publication on the web. The service will be accessible to the public.

Level: OWS – Quality of Experience

Preconditions:

• Consideration and effort expended to ensure a responsive, usable client-side map rendering, legend, symbology, attributes and metadata.
• Complex datasets are optimized (e.g. minimally generalized) to ensure:
• Service is responsive and does not appear to fail to load
• Service renders and returns information quickly
• Load on server is reduced
• Dataset attributes essential to understanding and using the web map service are made available; attributes of marginal interest are excluded.
• Titles, attribute names, legends included in the web mapping service are human-readable, meaningful and do not include jargon, overly technical or esoteric terms, or acronyms.

Story: Dan is tasked with making simple feature information associated with a new and exciting dataset available to the public using an OGC-WMS. Dan has set up several OGC-WMS before, but has never considered the needs of potential users of the service before. Because this dataset is so topical, the web service is sure to be very popular and used for many different purposes. This causes Dan to think carefully about how the web service will be perceived, from both a performance perspective (response time, speed of rendering, availability, managing load on the server) and from a quality-of-content perspective (what attributes of the data are most interesting and which are less interesting, titles, attributes, legend content are provided in simple, human readable terms that contain a sufficient amount of meaningful intelligence). Dan references a best practices guide from a trusted agency to ensure that he provides the web mapping service in a way to make it responsive, clearly rendered, understandable and usable to a wide range of end-users.

-- CindyMitchell - 13 Jul 2016