[Gdal-dev] GDAL2Tiles - Raster Maps Tile Publishing and KML Generation

[Klokan Petr Přidal]

Hello folks,

results of my SoC project are published. Look at:

http://www.klokan.cz/projects/gdal2tiles/

Abstract:

Main issue of this project is to allow easy publishing of raster maps
on the Internet. Your raster file (like TIFF/GeoTIFF, MrSID, ECW,
JPEG2000, JPEG, PNG) is converted into a directory structure of small
PNG tiles (TMS compatible), which you can just copy to the webserver.
Simple webpages with viewers based on Google Maps and OpenLayers are
generated as well - so anybody can comfortably explore your maps
on-line and you do not need to install or configure any special
software (like mapserver) and the map displays very fast in the
webbrowser.

GDAL2Tiles generates also necessary metadata for Google Earth (KML
SuperOverlay), in case the supplied map uses EPSG:4326 projection.
Usage of gdalwarp utility is recommended for converting a raster maps
with another projection.

World files and embeded georeference is used during tile and KML
generation, but you can publish a picture without proper georeference
too.

Tile structure follows recommendation from OSGeo Tile Map Service
Specification (http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Tile_Map_Service_Specification).

Now, generated tiles supports only local-profile from TMS, so they can
not be used as overlay on top of Google Maps yet, this feature is on
the TODO list.

Original idea of this project was to implement a Raster Driver for
GDAL with the same functionality, but for the purpose of SoC project
stable utility was preferred in the end. Utility prototypes the future
raster driver.

Manual page for utility is part of the solution, as well as a document
describing several existing tile structures with links to further
documentation. Analyse of rotated SuperOverlay KML is done as well.

Utility gdal2tiles.py was accepted by GDAL community (trac ticket
#1763). It is directly usable with existing stable versions of tools
(GDAL, FWTools) and it is going to be distributed as part of GDAL
tools.

Keywords: KML, generator, generate, TMS, tile map service, static
tiles, pyramid tile structure, gdal, utility, maps, raster files, web,
publish
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Any comments/suggestions/discussion?

Klokan Petr Pridal