Book Image

GeoServer Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

By : Stefano Iacovella
Book Image

GeoServer Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

By: Stefano Iacovella

Overview of this book

GeoServer is an opensource server written in Java that allows users to share, process, and edit geospatial data. This book will guide you through the new features and improvements of GeoServer and will help you get started with it. GeoServer Beginner's Guide gives you the impetus to build custom maps using your data without the need for costly commercial software licenses and restrictions. Even if you do not have prior GIS knowledge, you will be able to make interactive maps after reading this book. You will install GeoServer, access your data from a database, and apply style points, lines, polygons, and labels to impress site visitors with real-time maps. Then you follow a step-by-step guide that installs GeoServer in minutes. You will explore the web-based administrative interface to connect to backend data stores such as PostGIS, and Oracle. Going ahead, you can display your data on web-based interactive maps, use style lines, points, polygons, and embed images to visualize this data for your web visitors. You will walk away from this book with a working application ready for production. After reading GeoServer Beginner's Guide, you will be able to build beautiful custom maps on your website using your geospatial data.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Setting visibility


When you look at Google maps or another web-mapping application, you can see that the map changes its style according to the zoom level. When you are looking at an entire continent, symbols are simple and there are a few features drawn on the map. As you get closer, you can see more labels--major roads change their symbols and minor roads appear.

This approach permits us to insert a large quantity of information on a web map while avoiding producing an almost unreadable crowd of labels and symbols. As an example, you can think of a cadastral map containing all USA parcels with a label showing owners. When you are looking at the entire country, it is impossible to show all this information without owning a several thousand inch wide display! A good approach would be to just show the country's boundaries and major roads and places on smaller scales and avoid showing parcels until you are not so close to see just a county.

The way to build such a map with SLD is by using zoom...