[mapserver-users] abutters lists

[Antti.Roppola at brs.gov.au]

This all relates to stuff I have been pondering...

<ramble>

One question I have is just how much does .shp constrain us doing
these sorts of operations? Once upon a time, I wrote some code to
generate adjacency matrices for forest compartments. Doing this in
Arc/INFO was great, the LPOLY,RPOLY topology meant I could do the
whole thing in a couple of database queries. Shape OTOH will let you
have "adjacent" boundaries that don't quite touch, or indeed overlap,
which makes these kinds of operations a bit more tricky. Point being
that the format you store spatial data in influences what you can
do with said spatial data. 

This is where I see things like PostGIS fitting in. Rather than
trying to do it all inside Mapserver, would it be more sensible
to expect your feature source to do these sorts of operations for you?
In this case, all Mapserver would ned to know is how to display the
feature returned.

</ramble>

Cheers,

Antti

-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin Flanders [mailto:kevinflanders at rcn.com]
Sent: Wednesday, 20 November 2002 6:07 AM
To: mapserver-users at lists.gis.umn.edu
Subject: [mapserver-users] abutters lists


While graphs sounds feasible and fast, wouldn't it be wiser to focus on the
buffer approach which would be on the fly, and could be implemented to work
with any dataset and user chosen distance?  This would open up the
opportunity to do route buffering (ie. find abutters to a street or street
segment, etc.).


Kevin