I have put together preview for visually shaking maps where you don’t get just map layer names, but also preview of layers ! Somehow I couldn’t find any page on internet that would allow you to display layers from GetCapabilities WMS as image thumbnails. I’ve kept this idea for a long time and actually it started with yahoo pipes year ago – why not to visually display GetCapabilities as RSS feed with image thumbnails referenced as media type in the feed ? after little experimenting I realized that the value is in combination of position and WMS information, so the use case is “I am here on this place and hey WMS servers, give me all you know about this place…”

That lead me to the prototype of the site codenamed ‘MapBinder’ that allows you to visually combine WMS layers. Before you jump there, let me put here some credits to projects and people who enabled that – first it isOpenLayers 2.7 plus some sandboxed content that implemented GetCapabilities..I don’t remember exact location, then it is blog on tydlevidle.cz that implemented extension to read mapy.cz (mapy.cz is proprietary web based geoengine for maps like google but is using different projection). The last piece I found on some reference on geocaching.cz where someone pointed on conversion.js JavaScript by Tomas Ebenlendr. I forgot to mention that MapBinder is now synced with mapy.cz since it would be hard to overlay mapy.cz with JTSK-based projection, I have decided that reprojection will be done by user’s brain – having side by side maps – everyone can benefit from the content even they do not overlay.

Map Binder can be found on page http://www.sumbera.com/lab/wmsbinder/getcap.htm . Feel free to save it and examine it. I believe that from this point desktop and web readers of WMS layers will display thumbnails for better user experience :).