setting up a web mapping system

[Frank Warmerdam]

On Apr 4, 2005 7:34 AM, Stuart Blair <stublair at gmail.com> wrote:
>  The data is currently in shapefile format and i want to develop a decent
> open
>  source system to get the data on the internet, however, being a bit new to
> all
>  this I am struggling to find anywhere that tells you how to set this sort
> of
>  thing up or indeed all the software you need. as i understand it at the
> moment
>  the chain of event would be:
>
>  shapefile -> mapserver -> gml -> wfs client (though i could really do with
> an
>  example of one to use) -> shapefile ->geoserver -> jo bloggs using internet
>  explorer looking at the (jazz) files.
>
>  is this correct or am i way off the mark. I would really really appreciate
> any
>  help you may may be able to give and websites/documents you would recommend
> to
>  help me get going.

Stuart,

Are you sure you want to make WFS part of this?   I would have assumed
that you would want to provide a visual view into the data with mapserver
rather than providing direct access to the underlying data via WFS.  WFS
clients are rare, and it would likely take a sophisticated user to make much
use of a WFS feed.

I may be misconstruing your intentions, but I would suggest you focus on
building a mapserver application using either MapServer in CGI mode, or
perhaps as a mapscript application, based off your shapefiles.

If you have alot of data it might make sense to load it into PostGIS.  One
nice thing about putting it in PostGIS is that you can efficiently do queries
based on time or other parameters whereas if you do this from a shapefile
all features are read each time (though non-applicable features can be
easily discarded).

Are you wanting folks to have an easy way of entering new information
and to correct existing information?  This will add some complication to
your work, but I would still suggest addressing this as a mapscript operation.
It is more important though in this situation that you load your data into
PostGIS as updating a shapefile in-place is pretty difficult.

Best regards,
--
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
light and sound - activate the windows | http://pobox.com/~warmerdam
and watch the world go round - Rush    | Geospatial Programmer for Rent