time series representations in Mapserver

[David Bitner]

Gerry, 

Did you ever get anything figured out for this?  I just came upon this
thread again.  if you take Uli's reccomendation and go with the WMS
Time approach, you can build upon whats been done by the mapbuilder
folks (http://mapbuilder.sourceforge.net/). Otherwise if you look on
pure javascript resources for information on preloading images (just
manipulate the time string that you send to the map requests) and
animating them using javascripts setTimeout function.  Most of the
resources for this are for creating rotating banners on web pages, but
the idea holds perfectly well for creating animated maps.  I know a
couple NWS sites use this approach for radar.  I used this on the NWS
Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center (http://www.nohrsc.nws.gov) site to
animate snow pack (not a mapserver backend, but same idea).

David
> >
> > OK... that's a start.  However, I'm looking at weather observations,
> > usually they're from fixed sites (well, excluding the storm chasers:-).
> >   I'm wondering if anything's been done for animation-ish stuff, so I
> > could display the temperature contours, or, for instance, a changing
> > landscape of wind barbs...
> >
> > Thanks, Gerry
> >
> > David Bitner wrote:
> >
> >>If all you need is to show all of something that fit within a window
> >>of time on a single image (ie not an animation) you can either use sql
> >>statements with GDAL (I've not done this myself) or if you have your
> >>data in PostGIS all you need to do is add substitution variables into
> >>your SQL statement.
> >>
> >>For example, I display flight tracks at an airport using mapserver and
> >>I include a startdate and enddate as cgi variables sent to mapserver
> >>then in my mapfile use percent notation in my mapfile:
> >>DATA "targets from (select * from flighttrack where stime <= '%eDate%'
> >>and etime >='%sDate%')as tracks USING UNIQUE opnum USING SRID=-1"
> >>
> >>On 6/3/05, Gerry Creager N5JXS <gerry.creager at tamu.edu> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>>We're looking at several applications where we need some time-selection
> >>>capabilities.  Has anyone done this successfully with Mapserver, and if
> >>>so, might you share some tips?
> >>>
> >>>TIA,gerry
> >>>--
> >>>Gerry Creager -- gerry.creager at tamu.edu
> >>>Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University
> >>>Cell: 979.229.5301 Office: 979.458.4020 FAX: 979.847.8578
> >>>Page: 979.228.0173
> >>>Office: 903A Eller Bldg, TAMU, College Station, TX 77843
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >
> 
> 
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