Suggestions for Data-Serving & UI

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Shoaib,

Topozone.com is serving 10+ TB of raster data using mapserver. So this
is definitely doable. Among data Topozone has are seamless coverage of
the whole US in USGS digital othro quarter quad (DOQQ). Where there is
overlap, the last data tiled takes priority in the image. Or you can be
smart about how you build the tileindexes like putting the newest data
last in the tileindex so it is drawn last giving it priority in appearance.

Ed McNierney can probably add much more detail. One of the important
details is how the data inside the GeoTIFF is organized as this will
greatly impact performance. In fact you might want to scan the list
archives for articles postted by "McNierney"

Regards,
  -Steve W.
   http://imaptools.com/

Shoaib Burq wrote:
> 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
>