Introduction

Traditionally, GIS resources have been accessed directly. You would pull data into an application running on a local machine and use that machine to perform work on those data. This strategy has the benefit of making good use of powerful desktop or workstation computers, but it has the drawback of making it more difficult to share resources. Sharing direct-access resources often means making multiple copies of data, which are hard to keep in sync. Even with an effective data management strategy, the complexity of the software required means that only a few people in any given organization have the skills to make use of the resources.

The difficulty of sharing GIS resources is a barrier to good decision making because it limits who will be able to benefit from the insights of geospatial data. One strategy for overcoming this barrier is to make GIS resources available as web services. Instead of accessing data directly, a web service makes data available over the network. Instead of analyzing data on a local machine, a web service enables analysis to run on a remote server. Instead of using a single complex GIS application, web services enable the creation of multiple web apps tailored to individual workflows.

There are several different technologies for turning GIS resources into web services. This workshop will address how those services are created in Esri’s ArcGIS system. The focus will be on clarifying ambiguity in the terms used throughout the ArcGIS system and differentiating between separate components that are often incorrectly referred to interchangeably.