[Mapserver-users] postgis and 4d data in mapserver

[David Bitner]

>Hey, I fly on planes!  I *demand* maximum precision. :)
>
>David, mapserver is for drawing pictures of spatial data.  It's
>great at what it does, but it's not an N dimensional visualization
>environment.

>cheers,
>Sean

Sean, not to worry, this application is for monitoring aircraft noise in the
neighborhoods surrounding an urban airport.  I won't make your plane crash.

Mapserver would still only be used to create two dimensional maps.  For the
animations, it would just end up being a series of maps shown sequentially
(possibly the flights being swf files overlayed on the background image in a
flash application) that showed where the flight is at a particular time and
a tail of a certain time length trailing behind it. For the elevation
profile, I would just want to take the geometry from a line a user could
draw on the map and query out what the elevations of the flights were and
then any graph could be made elsewhere.  The main thing is to be able to
have a database that I can easily query out the elevation and time
information at points along the flight track as well as looking at the track
as a whole.  Currently at my hands I have ArcSDE on top of Oracle (without
the spatial extensions) and am looking to possibly to move to
postgresql/postgis or oracle spatial to maintain this data.  It sounds like
LWGEOMs may be able to work for me (would I be able to get the elevation at
a certain place in the line where it intersects a line in two dimensional
space?) in postgis, but I am far from locked into anything right now.  The
basic point is to take a 2-d map, filter it by time, and use the powers of
the database to drive other queries.