WMS is an Open Geospatial Consortium protocol for delivering geo-referenced map images over the Internet. There are many public WMS servers. The free ones are mostly provided by government agencies and research and educational organizations. Spatineo (http://www.spatineo.com/), a commercial spatial web services monitor, provides a free, searchable list of WMS resources, as does Skylab Mobilesystems (http://www.skylab-mobilesystems.com/en/wms_serverlist.html). The US government's open Data Catalog (http://geo.data.gov/) is a good resource for US-specific WMS links. However, there are lots of other lists; just search for WMS servers.

When you find a WMS server of interest, you want the WMS URL so you can paste it into a Spotfire map chart WMS layer setting. Not all the WMS links you find will work. Sometimes, the server will be down or no longer available.

Most WMS streams have multiple layers of information. Spotfire will show you the available layers...