GIS for Web Developers: Adding Where to Your Application

This talk demonstrates how you can build your own Google Maps in-house using nothing but open source software. We look at desktop clients, web servers, and everything in between. We also discuss integrating free, public domain data from sources like the US Census Bureau and the USGS. If you're looking for real-world examples of AJAX in use, you'll find it here. If you're looking for real-world examples of web services in use, you'll find it here. We start by exploring free datasets out there in the wild. They are stored in a myriad of file formats (some proprietary, some open) and projections. Free tools like GDAL and uDig make it easy to convert them and visualize them. Once the data is normalized, we store it in a PostgreSQL/PostGIS database. Not only does the database centralize the mapping data, it opens up quite a few interesting querying capabilities. Serving up the data is the final piece of the puzzle. We look at web services based on the OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) standards. We use Tomcat and the GeoServer WAR to expose our data via OGC interfaces. We look at a couple of Ajax-based mapping frameworks (MapBuilder and OpenLayers) that truly bring the power of a Google Maps-like website to your own in-house application.