[Indonesia] FOSS GIS follow up sharing and training

[Arnulf Christl]

Wardiyono wrote:
> Everyone,
> 
> I am sure some of us, if not all, trying to install mapbender, 
> mapserver, postgis on ubuntu. Can we share your experiences?
> 
> I am successfully replicate the whole training process based on Arnulf 
> instructions in my computers. Using xubuntu 7.10 with 5 DVDs repository, 
> the mapserver and all component is running both on my desktop and laptop.
> 
> Now, what next? Having able to display the shape and postgis maps is 
> nice, but displaying the information attribute or link for each layers 
> will be more important. A single polygon map of forest concessions, link 
> to more than 10 different data table (see the example tables in 
> http://iuphhk.fwi.or.id). It will not saying much without these tables.
> 
> Did any one able to do that on mapbender?
> 
> If i am not mistaken, it has to do with WFS function. The WFS 
> capabilites should be set in Mapbender. How can we set the WFS 
> capabilites on our mapserver? I have not read all the documentations 
> yet,  may be the answer was there. Pitty that I did not have  24 hours 
> internet connection. Did any one have an off-line documentation that can 
> be share with everybody?
> 
> Or, Dr. Francis, is this a good time and a fine justification to call an 
> advance training? 8-)
> 
> Regards,
> Yono
> 

Hello,
sorry that I have to write in English as my Bahasa competency still is that of a three-year-old...

If I understand your question right you want to get information from - for example - a forest ares that is displayed in a map. 

There are two ways to do this. Due to the short time unfortunately we did not cover either of them. I will give a very light introduction here. If you are interested we can develop how to do this on the demonstrations server, once RISTEK can provide it. 

The first way to do this is to use the OGC WMS GetFeatureInfo request. It uses a click coordinate that has been selected using the mouse and returns the information that is found at that location. To get a result from MapServer it has to be configured accordingly, find some information here:

http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/docs/howto/wms_server

In the MAP file you need an item for TEMPLATE, it is a html skeleton that gets filled by MapServer with the corresponding values form the found objects. 

The other way to do it is to install an OGC WFS (Web Feature Server) that looks into the same data as the corresponding WMS. This is a lot more work but also allows for other ways to search data, for example by attributes, within a rectangle and even as contained within another geometry. 

If you only want to allow people to click on an object and get the information of this object returned then GetFeatureInfo is enough. 

If you are interested to see an example I can sen the corresponsing files for the Germany project that we have been using in the course. But it would be much nicer to do this with data from Indonesia and ideally even on a server that runs a RISTEK.

Best regards, 
Arnulf.