Suggestions for Data-Serving & UI

[Shoaib Burq]

Hi All,

I am fairly new to mapserver but I was thinking of using it along with
a complementry back end, like PostGIS to perform the job assigned to
me:

to improve the following user interface. Plus allow flexible updates
and expansion of data's spatial coverage and streamline the data
processing:

http://woodmans.omg.unb.ca/~camp2005/

As seen, currently, the data is split up into mapsheets (size is
arbitrarily, i think). This is fine if you have to do it once but  as
the data comes from high resolution multibeam sonar it results in
strips of raster geotiff/ArcGRID ASCII data. Each strip corresponds to
a line over the target. Currently we are splitting and mosaiking the
line based on which mapsheet they fall under. There is a 2" overlap. A
real mess!

There are 2 main raster data products: Backscatter and Bathy. Plus the metadata.

The initial data-set will be ~100GB but if this work reasonably well
we may later want to serve all our data (100's of Gig) using
Mapserver, provided updataing is easy and performance doesn't degrade.

My dream would be to seamlessly download data products from regions
based on the user's bounding-box-query from a mouse drag or entered
co-ordinates.

Do you think mapserver or other OSS technologies today are up to the
task? If so are there any demos out there? If not what's missing?

I'll keep this short and provide more info as needed.

Thanks heaps
Shoaib