[Mapserver-users] Animated layers

[Steve Young]

Hi List,

I'm looking for some ideas or examples of animated layers. I have in
mind creating a time-series layer of land use change. The Mapserver user
would zoom to their area of interest then click an 'animate' button and
have Mapserver, with the help of some PHP, cycle through a time
sequence. The layer format could be raster or vector. I think it would
be relatively easy to get something working, but to have it work well,
i.e. smoothly under varying server load, would be something else. One
route might be outputting Mapserver gifs to a gif animating utility,
then delivering its output to the browser. Sound feasible?

On an off-topic, but related note: Does anyone know of
programs/utilities that can fill in spatial data gaps in time-sequences?
i.e. Take two polygons, one as a start point and one as an end point
then create fill-in polygons. I suspect there's a whole industry devoted
to such intangibles, but I haven't found it yet.

Thanks for any help and ideas.

Steve Young