[MapServer-users] Tutorials for creating time dimension images and good web frontends for dynamically changing map projects?

[Stefan Gofferje]

Good morning all!

After the relative ease of my first mapserver project, I'm now motivated 
and keen on getting another project running.

Since about a year (plus minnus), I'm every day checking for Sentinel I 
and II data covering the area where I live. If there is anything, I 
download the data and run some scripts which do automatic processing 
and generating of composites, like SAR VV/VH or NDVI, NDCI, etc.
The ready images are then posted to a Telegram channel.

At the moment, there's still a number of manual steps (search data, 
decide what to download, trigger download, trigger processing and 
trigger Telegram push) and the existing scripts are Bash scripts calling 
GDAL tools.

My first step now is to learn Python and move everything from Bash to 
Python and automate it, ideally so far that the whole process can run in 
a Docker container as a cron job.

Then I was thinking, instead of pushing images to Telegram, I could use 
mapserver to serve the images to some web frontend. The map files are 
very easily created programmatically, so that should be easy. I'm 
missing a few things for that, though:
While going through mapserver's docs, I noticed that it can handle time 
dimensions for imagery. That sounds like something worth exploring. The 
docs describe the use of a shape file but unfortunately, I have no clue 
how to to *create* that programmatically.

Regarding the frontend, I could just put up a single page leaflet app. 
That would be easy enough. But I'm wondering if there's already some 
cool solutions out there.

So, If anybody has a link or pointer for me on the programmatic creation 
of shape files for time-indexed imagery and/or interesting web frontend 
projects, I would be very grateful!

-Stefan

-- 
  (o_   Stefan Gofferje            | SCLT, MCP, CCSA
  //\   Reg'd Linux User #247167   | VCP #2263
  V_/_  https://www.gofferje.net   | https://www.saakeskus.fi