NOAA Digital Raster Charts in BSB, any guidance on use with mapserver?

[Paul Turner]

Howdy,

For 'free', both NOAA and Maptech have released the BSB versions of the 
NOAA raster charts - on NOAA's site, looks like around 1012 files. I've 
downloaded a couple of hundred and I'm wondering how best to manage this 
as there are maps with differing resolutions covering the same areas. 
I'm sure this is a solved problem so I'm hoping some kind soul out there 
might provide me with some guidance on how best to configure a map file 
to display these images in mapserver taking into account varying scales 
of these images - and here I'm aware of min/maxscale  - like I need to 
sort the files according to map scale and generate indexes for each 
group. Has someone already made a bundle of these guys? Bittorrent? Is 
there a WMS server (my preference)?

In case this is news, here are the links:

Lots of clicking, fast server

http://nauticalcharts.noaa.gov/mcd/Raster/Index.htm

Slow server, signup required
http://www.freeboatingcharts.com


Thx,

--Paul

Paul J Turner
OHSU-OGI-CCALMR