[Geomoose-users] OpenWebGIS

[Brian Fischer]

It's an interesting idea and we actually did something like this a few years back but for ArcGIS Desktop.  The concept was a publishing tool in ArcMap to GeoMoose.  You design your map in ArcMap then hit publish and it creates your mapfiles and mapbook for GeoMoose.  The biggest challenge was mapping all the symbology options between ESRI and MapServer.  

The other issue we ran into was funding to sustain it.

I have seen another commercial option out there but have never tried it.  https://www.geocat.net/bridge/   Would be curious to hear if anyone has tried this and how well it works.

Brian

-----Original Message-----
From: Geomoose-users [mailto:geomoose-users-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Dan Little
Sent: Monday, December 21, 2015 10:20 AM
To: James Klassen
Cc: GeoMOOSE Users List
Subject: Re: [Geomoose-users] OpenWebGIS

Does anyone keep tabs on QGIS' Web Mapping tool? They were trying to do some mapnik/WSGI thing a few years ago that I thought was somewhat exciting.  Otherwise, working with QGIS could involve a few steps:

1. Parsing the QGIS project files (easy enough IIRC) 2. Collecting/normalizing the data.
3. making a mapbook.
4. generating mapfiles (probably the hard part for anything complex).

BrianF and I have discussed this idea quite a few times over the years but have never been able to get enough funding/interest to really move it forward.  Once people get over the basic threshold of learning mapfiles they don't seem to be bothered much.



On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 12:17 PM, James Klassen <klassen.js at gmail.com> wrote:
> I did a Rails app years back that did this too.   Upload a shapefile and
> dynamically generated a mapbook and mapfile.  The styling was all SLD 
> and a default style was generated based on the shapefile type but had 
> to be hand edited from there.
>
> On Dec 16, 2015 12:15 PM, "Brent Fraser" <bfraser at geoanalytic.com> wrote:
>>
>> Eli,
>>   I totally agree with your 90% approach to support.
>>
>>   Not too sure about the QGIS extension option.  I've used an 
>> existing plugin to generate map files and was not impressed.  It had 
>> some trivial bugs, but the main problem was the level of coding 
>> needed to replicate a QGIS project in a map file with all the 
>> coordinate systems and styling options (and mapserver versions!).
>>
>>   To some extent, I would have a similar problem with my Python code, 
>> but its main purpose is just to get the mapbook and template syntax right.
>>
>> Best Regards,
>> Brent Fraser
>>
>> On 12/16/2015 10:28 AM, Eli Adam wrote:
>>>
>>> On Wed, Dec 16, 2015 at 8:53 AM, Brent Fraser 
>>> <bfraser at geoanalytic.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hey Dan,
>>>>
>>>> Some of their features are intriguing:
>>>>      View -> Timeline
>>>>      Project -> Save/Load
>>>>      About -> Game
>>>>
>>>> And
>>>>      Edit -> Upload Shapefile
>>>>
>>>>      That last one is interesting as I had built some Python to 
>>>> take a shapefile and generate a GeoMoose-friendly Maperver .map 
>>>> file and snippets for Geomoose's mapbook.xml (when answering some 
>>>> support questions the person frequently sends me a shapefile and a 
>>>> plea for help).  But shipping the
>>>> Python to users would just generate more support questions.   Maybe the
>>>> answer is to host the Python (or the PHP equivalent) on the 
>>>> Geomoose.org site?
>>>
>>> A QGIS extension that exports the same might be an option as well.
>>>
>>> For users I support, the goal is to take 90% of the users to what 
>>> they need with GeoMoose.  The remaining 10% getting the higher 
>>> effort to do custom one-off projects for them, design some other 
>>> process and system, or install and train them in QGIS or ArcMap.  
>>> Trying to shoehorn the last 10% into your all purpose tool takes way 
>>> more than 10% of the effort and is not worth it.  Or at least that 
>>> is my approach.
>>>
>>> Eli
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
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