GIS Web Mapping? 8
muengineer asks: "We're looking for a solution that will allow us to put a zoomable, panning campus map online, with clickable hyperlinks, but not fall into the trap of raster images with image maps. Preferably, I'd like to use something vector based, that can import our GIS data. Although there are solutions out there from companies like Autodesk and Intergraph, unfortunately they appear to be intimately tied to Windows NT as the server. Is there anything out there that will let me use Linux?"
Web Mapping Info (Score:1)
I've been working on the Open GIS [opengis.org] spec [opengis.org] for web mapping for a little less than a year now. We've come up with a simple spec that lets you construct a URL with a map request in it. The spec describes the format of the URL and how map servers should behave when they receive one of these.
If you build a campus map server that conforms to this spec, then later on, you can build HTML pages that can request campus maps superimposed on satellite photos or other neat data.
The first place to look is at the spec. [opengis.org] Revision 1.0 is due out "any day now" so don't get hung up on the details. Then look at what some people [webmapping.org] are doing with the spec.
Here's a sample HTML client [209.217.120.146] that talks to a Web Map Server which itself then knows about a dozen or so other Web Map Servers. (What we call a "cascading map server").
Take out the nospam from my email if you want to ask more questions... (By the way, I'm also a big OpenMap [bbn.com] fan - I open-sourced it while at BBN...)
First Person Mapping? (Score:1)
Mapping the library holdings into the Library Map and implementing "shoot-requested-book" is left as an exercise for the reader.
Openmap is probably what you are looking for (Score:1)
ObjectFX (Score:1)
They have a Java based Application Server which says it works on both NT & UNIX based platforms (I didn't see Linux mentioned however).
Another option would be MapXtreme [mapxtre.com] from MapInfo [mapinfo.com].
They have both NT and Java flavors, and I believe someone did get the Java version working on Linux.
Both products let you use data from backend databases like Oracle, SQL Server or even just ODBC/JDBC. MapXtremeJava also supports Oracle8i Spatial.
links to resources (Score:2)
If you are a developer look at these OGDI specs [globalgeo.com], and this library for reading shape files [velocet.ca]which might work well with some of the toolkits listed at freegis.org [freegis.org].
You should also cross post this question to the GRASS (grasslist@baylor.edu) and Remotesensing.org (osrs@remotesensing.org) mailing lists.
cheers,
-matt
VML (Score:2)
The same conversation also lead to the university of Leicester's Virtual Field Course [le.ac.uk]