[OpenLayers-Users] New to open layers some questions

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Fri, Jun 01, 2007 at 03:10:32PM -0400, Ali Khan wrote:
> Hey all, new to open layers. Right now i'm trying to develop something 
> similar to that CIA factbook where one can click on a country and get 
> the details. I've got the click stuff down and how to grab the 
> coordinates but what i dont understand is how to figure out the country 
> by the coordinates. I noticed witih the fact book it takes the 
> coordinates and i believe makes a box from them with max and min 
> long/lats and does something from there?

Posts to the server, and interprets the response. The server is
MapServer in this case.

> Can anyone help me shed some light on this? Is there a general file that 
> has the country data and coor that i can call on to get the country name 
> from?

MapServer does this against the dataset it's rendering.

http://data.freemap.in/view/DataSet/1 has a couple different copies of
the data for download. 

http://openlayers.org/presentations/mappingyourdata/ might help you get
started with mapping the data.

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
MetaCarta