View Services TG - Deprecate WMS 1.1.1

[MarcoMinghini]

Change proposal description

This change proposal aims at deprecating the use of WMS 1.1.1 to provide INSPIRE View Services.

Addressed TG

View Services TG

Location

All occurrences of WMS 1.1.1 in the View Service TG should be removed, thus leaving WMS 1.3.0 as the only WMS version allowed. A commit showing the exact sections to be removed is available here; in addition, Annex A and Annex B should be completely removed.

Issue faced

WMS 1.1.1 is an old standard, published by the OGC in 2002 and then soon (2006) updated with WMS 1.3.0. As such, it is currently rarely used in INSPIRE, since almost all WMS software implementations provide support for version 1.3.0 by default. In addition, the View Services TG (drafted more than ten years ago), while still allowing the use of WMS 1.1.1, already recommended the use of WMS 1.3.0. Finally, in constrast to WMS 1.3.0 which uses XML Schema, WMS 1.1.1 uses Document Type Definition (DTD) and DOCTYPE, which should not be allowed for security reasons (see here). See also a discussion about WMS 1.1.1 support in the ETF (on which the INSPIRE Reference Validator is based) here.

Proposed solution

Remove all occurrences of WMS 1.1.1 in the View Service TG.

Pull request

https://github.com/INSPIRE-MIF/technical-guidelines/pull/171

Additional information

Relevant legislation

• IR network services

Impact on IR

No impact on IR.

Impact on INSPIRE validator

The INSPIRE Reference Validator currently uses ETF 2.0, which does not trigger the securirty exception described here (relevant to ETF 2.1). However, the Validator only supports validation against WMS 1.3.0. When a WMS 1.1.1 service is validated, the Validator automatically changes the request to use version 1.3.0 of the service: if this exists, the validation is performed without issues; if this is not available, the Validator triggers an error (see this issue in the Validator helpdesk).

Linked issue

https://github.com/INSPIRE-MIF/helpdesk-validator/issues/1018

Impact on INSPIRE XML schemas

No impact

Impact on INSPIRE code lists

No impact

Change proposer

Joint Research Centre (JRC)

References

All relevant links were provided above.