The Open GIS Consortium which works on geoprocessing interoperability computing standards proposes this definion for Web Map Services :

A Web Map Service (WMS) produces maps of georeferenced data. We define a "map" as a visual representation of geodata; a map is not the data itself. This specification defines three WMS operations: GetCapabilities returns service-level metadata, which is a description of the service's information content and acceptable request parameters; GetMap returns a map image whose geospatial and dimensional parameters are welldefined; GetFeatureInfo (optional) returns information about particular features shown on a map. This specification defines a syntax for World Wide Web (WWW) Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) that invoke each of these operations. Also, an Extensible Markup Language (XML) encoding is defined for service-level metadata.

A standard web browser (on various platform like PDA or a tablet PC or a desktop computer) can ask a Web Map Service to perform these operations simply by submitting requests in the form of Uniform Resource Locators (URLs)¨. All URLs include a specification version number and a request type parameter.

We would like to use those specifications in order to get the map of EPFL on iPAQs.