Installation and Configuration
* Prerequisites
o web server with PHP support
o functional MapServer installation with PHP/MapScript
* Basic Installation
o extract archive
o configure web server to access htdocs directory
* MS4W installation is simple!
Main Configuration
* edit include/config.php
* set name of mapscript module
* set name of GD module
* modify default tile settings (if desired)
* set cache directory location
ka-Map ("ka" as in ka-boom!) is an open source project that is aimed at providing a javascript API for developing highly interactive web-mapping interfaces using features available in modern web browsers.
ka-Map has a number of interesting features. It sports the usual array of user interface elements such as:
- interactive, continuous panning without reloading the page
- keyboard navigation options (zooming, panning)
- zooming to pre-set scales
- scalebar, legend and keymap support
- optional layer control on client side (layers are made visible instantly but at reduced performance due to more images, and potentially slower browser interactivity)
- testing. ka-Map needs to be as stable as possible in all modern browsers. Please report success or failure of ka-Map in any browser
- features and bugs. ka-Map needs an active community of developers to help resolve problems and add new features. CVS commit access is restricted but is available to those that are honestly interested in contributing. Even so, anyone can contribute by reporting errors or suggesting new or changed features on the mailing list, or by sending code patches to the mailing list. They'll be considered and added to the CVS version as soon as possible
- Documenters. Documentation is lacking and contributors are needed to help with the developer's API (for maintaining and extending the core), a user's guide to integrating into a mapping application, and a user's guide for end user functionality.
Step by step to install mapserver for windows:
- Download MS4W Base Package from
http://www.maptools.org/ms4w/index.phtml?page=downloads.html. The package includes following components:
- Apache HTTP Server version 2.2.4
- PHP version 5.2.4
- MapServer CGI 5.0
- MapScript 5.0 (CSharp, Java, PHP, Python)
- Includes support for Oracle 10g, and SDE data (if you have associated client/dlls)
- MrSID support built-in
- GDAL/OGR 1.4.2 and Utilities
- MapServer Utilities
- PROJ Utilities
- Shapelib Utilities
- Shp2tile Utility
- Shpdiff Utility
- AVCE00 Utilities
- OGR/PHP Extension 1.0.0
- OWTChart 1.2.0
- Extract into root directory (c:/ms4w or d:/ms4w).
- Execute apache-install.bat to install service of Apache.
- Checking using your browser http://localhost, will display on browser like this:
- Done, so easy right :D
Features
- Advanced cartographic output
- Scale dependent feature drawing and application execution
- Feature labeling including label collision mediation
- Fully customizable, template driven output
- TrueType fonts
- Map element automation (scalebar, reference map, and legend)
- Thematic mapping using logical- or regular expression-based classes
- Support for popular scripting and development environments
- PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, Java, and C#
- Cross-platform support
- Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, and more
- A multitude of raster and vector data formats
- TIFF/GeoTIFF, EPPL7, and many others via GDAL
- ESRI shapfiles, PostGIS, ESRI ArcSDE, Oracle Spatial, MySQL and many others via OGR
- Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) web specifications
- WMS (client/server), non-transactional WFS (client/server), WMC, WCS, Filter Encoding, SLD, GML, SOS
- Map projection support
- On-the-fly map projection with 1000s of projections through the Proj.4 library
Web mapping is the process of designing, implementing, generating and delivering maps on the World Wide Web. While web mapping primarily deals with technological issues, web cartography additionally studies theoretic aspects: the use of web maps, the evaluation and optimization of techniques and workflows, the usability of web maps, social aspects, and more. Web GIS is similar to web mapping but with an emphasis on analysis, processing of project specific geodata and exploratory aspects. Often the terms web GIS and web mapping are used synonymously, even if they don't mean exactly the same. In fact, the border between web maps and web GIS is blurry. Web maps are often a presentation media in web GIS and web maps are increasingly gaining analytical capabilities. A special case of web maps are mobile maps, displayed on mobile computing devices, such as mobile phones, smart phones, PDAs, GPS and other devices. If the maps on these devices are displayed by a mobile web browser or web user agent, they can be regarded as mobile web maps. If the mobile web maps also display context and location sensitive information, such as points of interest, the term location based services is frequently used.
The use of the web as a dissemination medium for maps can be regarded as a major advancement in cartography and opens many new opportunities, such as realtime maps, cheaper dissemination, more frequent and cheaper updates of data and software, personalized map content, distributed data sources and sharing of geographic information. It also implicates many challenges due to technical restrictions (low display resolution and limited bandwidth, in particular with mobile computing devices, many of which are physically small, and use slow wireless Internet connections), copyright[1] and security issues, reliability issues and technical complexity. While the first web maps were primarily static, due to technical restrictions, today's web maps can be fully interactive and integrate multiple media. This means that both web mapping and web cartography also have to deal with interactivity, usability and multimedia issues.
GIS is a system of hardware and software used for storage, retrieval, mapping, and analysis of geographic data. Practitioners also regard the total GIS as including the operating personnel and the data that go into the system. Spatial features are stored in a coordinate system (latitude/longitude, state plane, UTM, etc.), which references a particular place on the earth. Descriptive attributes in tabular form are associated with spatial features. Spatial data and associated attributes in the same coordinate system can then be layered together for mapping and analysis. GIS can be used for scientific investigations, resource management, and development planning.
GIS differs from CAD and other graphical computer applications in that all spatial data is geographically referenced to a map projection in an earth coordinate system. For the most part, spatial data can be "re-projected" from one coordinate system into another, thus data from various sources can be brought together into a common database and integrated using GIS software. Boundaries of spatial features should "register" or align properly when re-projected into the same coordinate system. Another property of a GIS database is that it has "topology," which defines the spatial relationships between features. The fundamental components of spatial data in a GIS are points, lines (arcs), and polygons. When topological relationships exist, you can perform analyses, such as modeling the flow through connecting lines in a network, combining adjacent polygons that have similar characteristics, and overlaying geographic features.
Why Geography?
Geography is a serious discipline with multibillion dollar implications for businesses and governments. Choosing sites, targeting market segments, planning distribution networks, responding to emergencies, or redrawing country boundaries—all of these problems involve questions of geography.
How Does GIS Use Geography?
With a geographic information system (GIS), you can link information (attributes) to location data, such as people to addresses, buildings to parcels, or streets within a network. You can then layer that information to give you a better understanding of how it all works together. You choose what layers to combine based on what questions you need to answer.
Three Views of a GIS
A GIS is most often associated with maps. A map, however, is only one way you can work with geographic data in a GIS, and only one type of product generated by a GIS. This is important, because it means that a GIS can provide a great deal more problem-solving capabilities than using a simple mapping program or adding data to an online mapping tool (creating a "mash-up").
A GIS can be viewed in three ways:
- The Database View: A GIS is a unique kind of database of the world—a geographic database (geodatabase). It is an "Information System for Geography." Fundamentally, a GIS is based on a structured database that describes the world in geographic terms.
- The Map View: A GIS is a set of intelligent maps and other views that show features and feature relationships on the earth's surface. Maps of the underlying geographic information can be constructed and used as "windows into the database" to support queries, analysis, and editing of the information. This is called geovisualization.
- The Model View: A GIS is a set of information transformation tools that derive new geographic datasets from existing datasets. These geoprocessing functions take information from existing datasets, apply analytic functions, and write results into new derived datasets.
Together, these three views are critical parts of an intelligent GIS and are used at varying levels in all GIS applications.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)