Practical GIS

Spatial servers

The only question that remains is; how can spatial data be inserted into this architecture? Well, they can be stored as static resources in vector formats like KML or GeoJSON. The browser can read the content of these structured text files, and client-side web mapping software can use them. Publishing raster layers is a little more tricky. As web browsers do not have a concept about raster data, they need those layers as regular images. Therefore, we have to create a representation model on the server side, and send the resulting images to the client. The usual way of storing pre-rendered raster layers is to tile them, and serve the tiles. Then, if the client-side web mapping software knows the tiling scheme, it can create ...