[OSGeo Africa] OSGeo

[Paul Scott]

Maurizio,

Looks like a good start! Thanks!

On Thu, 2006-07-20 at 14:19 +0200, Maurizio wrote:
> .... but archived just a fraction.  And no vector available yet since
> our archiving system is unable to handle the intuituive graphic search
> facility we had had in mind (it was actually developed once upon a 
> 
In this scenario, why not use the tools available to us? Just having a
quick think about it, there are two immediate solutions to your problem
(there are probably around 50, but these are the two I was thinking
around...)

1. Dump all of your Vector data into a PostGIS database. Use Mapserver
to serve the data and then use tools like pgsql2shp and asGML() to
create user defined vector datasets on the fly. Scenario would be that
the user selects an area on the map, and is able to download the
selection or current view either as GML or as a shp file.

2. This can also work for the above...
Use the Apache Lucene search engine, or my PHP5 port of it as part of
the new version of our framework to index the files/db as a fulltext
search. This will give you an interface much the same as Google Earth
where you can search for a place, zoom to it, but have the added bonus
of being able to download the data as well.

In both of these scenarios, you get the added bonus that users are only
downloading what they want/need as well, so we save precious bandwidth.

--Paul

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