Serving time-dependant data in a custom environment

[Benoit Myard]

Hi list,

We would like to serve geographic data which is completely
time-dependant. The data is not stored in a common format : upon the
years, we've built our own database system with geographic extensions
like the ones you can find in PostGIS.

For now, we have been impressed by MapServer's ability to render
countries, cities... and now we want to render our data, which isn't
that easy.

In the first place, we thought to the WFS Specifications as the better
mean to achieve this for two reasons. The first one being that we
could write a wrapper script to access the data (easy to maintain).
The second one being that we could use HTTP (scalable system).

Unfortunately, I've just noticed that the WFS specifications don't
include TIME support as WMS does and this solution isn't just
possible.

One possible solution to this problem would be to write a custom OGR
driver |1] and use it within MapServer. Could someone share his
experience in such a field ?

One other possible solution I'm not sure of would be to use MapScript,
but I really have no idea of whether it will help or not. In fact we
don't use MapScript and well, if you think this is a possible
solution, just let me know.

I'm pretty sure I'm not the first one facing this limitation of the
WFS Specifications; I would appreciate to hear how others handled it
afterwards.

Thanks in advance.

[1] http://www.gdal.org/ogr/ogr_drivertut.html

-- 
Benoit Myard