Spatially Adjusted

Tag: mapserver

  • Chris Tweedie Looks at Google Maps Accuracy

    Link – Its google – it must be right

    After comparing some common overlays from both Mapserver and Arcims (using the php code i posted earlier), it was obvious something was up, either my data being projected was wrong or googles base data was out

    Chris makes the same assertion that I did yesterday and it backs up why metadata is just so important. If the Google Maps service is going to be taken seriously they will have to start addressing this issue.

    Of course if they just leave it in Beta for the next couple years, what does it matter?

  • Working with Ka Map

    One of more intriguing reasons to use UMN MapServer is Ka Map. I’m quite impressed with how it is able to pan and zoom without having to load the whole page. We’ve tried to do as much as we can on the client side of ArcIMS and with Ka Map we can continue that trend.

    Since ESRI released ArcIMS 3 a couple years ago, there haven’t been any big changes to the default templates. I’d love to see ESRI offer some new ones on their site for those who can’t hire someone to customize ArcIMS for them or have the to do it themselves. Maybe with the advent of ESRI Developer Network and the Code Exchange we’ll see some more, but I doubt it.

  • Moving Forward with Open Source GIS

    Now that we have our PostGIS/PostgreSQL running just about perfectly on our RedHat server, it is time to move forward with UMN Mapserver. I’m excited to see how much we can do with it and I think it will open up so much more to our products than .NET and ArcIMS ever did. As I said earlier, I want to make a front end that looks the same to the end users, whether we use ArcIMS/ArcSDE on the back end or Mapserver/PostGIS. In my previous post, I said that the GUI just wasn’t there for PostGIS, but letting it sit on a Linux server hosting our data should be great.

    This should be a great week as we start playing with Mapserver/PostGIS and seeing what we can do with it.

  • Designing a front end

    I manage a GIS at a small company in Tempe, AZ. We’ve been designing web based GIS sites since the old ArcView IMS extension. We’ve moved from MapObjects IMS to ArcIMS 3,4,9 and now we’ve begun to look at UMN Mapserver. Basically we’ve heard from clients that they are having problems with the cost of maintenance of ESRI products. If we could eliminate ArcIMS/ArcSDE for these people and still provide our look and feel, this might be a market worth looking into. I’d love to make our sites work with any backend that the client wants. We’ve used .NET in our latest products, but maybe PHP or JSP would be a better choice for doing this. I’m just not sure what to think at this point, but I’ve got our database programmer looking at getting PostGIS and Mapserver installed on our Linux server.

    It’s going to be quite a move from ArcIMS/ArcSDE/Oracle, but maybe we’ll learn something. I’ll post more about this next week when we get it installed.