New GiS for History site

[P Kishor]

On 9/12/06, Ben Loh <benpub at inquirium.net> wrote:
..
> >Do you really need any overly complex map when just showing the
> >overview? The very first view, that of the entire country, need not be
> >very complex. You should make liberal and judicious use of MAXSCALE
> >(or whatever the syntax is... have forgotten most of .map files),
> >querying and drawing complex geometries only when zoomed in.
>
> Yes, very true.  We're hoping to get simplified shape files from
> another source soon.  My admittedly shaky understanding is that the
> technique here is to swap between the complex and the simple shape
> files based on the scale, yes?  Or is there actually a way to have
> mapserver simplify the shape file on the fly?


Yes to former, nope to latter. You don't want to have MapServer
simplify the data for you. Instead, you preprocess and simplify the
data for MapServer. Build different datasets for different scales, and
then just query the appropriate dataset. Your application will become
very sprightly.

-- 
Puneet Kishor http://punkish.eidesis.org/
Nelson Inst. for Env. Studies, UW-Madison http://www.ies.wisc.edu/
Open Source Geospatial Foundation https://edu.osgeo.org/