The GeoSeer Blog

One Million Layers, and a Stats Page

Posted on 2018-09-27

GeoSeer has now hit the one million distinct spatial layers milestone in its index. That's a staggering amount of spatial data, and all of it is freely accessible via OGC standards, and of course, also easily searchable with GeoSeer. This actually represents over 1.7 million publicly available WMS, WFS, WCS, and WMTS layers - see this previous blog post for a discussion on why this number is even higher. This represents data from over 100,000 OGC services.

We've been gradually increasing the number of layers in our index consistently since launch as a result of a combination of things: our ongoing efforts to expand where we collect data from, improvements to the GeoSeerBot (we feed it lots of veggies!), and ever more layers being added to services we already index.

How many more layers and services are there out there? We don't know; but we plan on doing a blog post about the number of services, so keep an eye out. And we're going to keep trying to find more.

What was that about a Stats Page?

That's right, because we're big data nerds (see what we did there?), we've also created a page that's got a high-level breakdown of statistics for what's in our index. You can find the new stats page here. We don't claim to have a complete index of all public OGC services, but we're fairly certain it's a large chunk of the ones that are out there, so this is a fairly representative sample of what's available on the internet.

The stats page will be updated about once a month and should always approximately represent what's in our index. In the future we plan on adding further and more detailed statistics including a breakdown of what middleware is used to run these services, so keep an eye out for it.

Need more stats? Ask away!

If there's any particular statistic you're interested in that's not on there, let us know and we'll consider adding it. Or if we don't think others will find it interesting (how many people really want to know that the average (mean) number of Layers per Endpoint is (at the time of writing) 12.99? Or that the median and mode are both 2, the minimum is 1, and the maximum is 4,629), we'll tell you directly, we try to be nice like that. So ask away.

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