Mapping Hacks

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Chapter 8, Building the Geospatial Web

#89 Publish Your Geodata to the Web with GeoServer

HACK

The idea behind these samples is to provide a hint of the power of doing

spatial analysis with PostGIS. Many open source GIS viewing and publish-

ing applications support PostGIS as a backend, so it’s also an ideal vehicle

for sharing your data on the geospatial web; we’ll show how to do this with

GeoServer and MapServer in the rest of this chapter.

HACK

#89

Publish Your Geodata to the Web with

GeoServer Hack #89

If the OGC web standards meet your needs, GeoServer is a great way to get

started.

At the beginning of this chapter, we introduced the OpenGIS Consortium’s

vision for accessible GIS with their Geography Markup Language, Web Fea-

ture Service, and Web Map Service standards. If you decide that WFS,

WMS, and GML fit your needs, GeoServer is a great place to start.

GeoServer is a Java-servlet-based toolkit that aspires to be the Apache of the

geospatial web, designed to make it easy for new users to install and publish

their existing geodata. GeoServer is GPL and is available from Sourceforge at

http://geoserver.sf.net/. The project’s main supporter is a nonprofit called

The Open Planning Project, which believes that more accessible data about

our environment will help to give citizens a greater say about the planning

decisions that affect their lives.

GeoServer is a J2EE application built as a thin ...