Book Image

PostGIS Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Pedro Wightman, Bborie Park, Stephen Vincent Mather, Thomas Kraft, Mayra Zurbarán
Book Image

PostGIS Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Pedro Wightman, Bborie Park, Stephen Vincent Mather, Thomas Kraft, Mayra Zurbarán

Overview of this book

PostGIS is a spatial database that integrates the advanced storage and analysis of vector and raster data, and is remarkably flexible and powerful. PostGIS provides support for geographic objects to the PostgreSQL object-relational database and is currently the most popular open source spatial databases. If you want to explore the complete range of PostGIS techniques and expose related extensions, then this book is for you. This book is a comprehensive guide to PostGIS tools and concepts which are required to manage, manipulate, and analyze spatial data in PostGIS. It covers key spatial data manipulation tasks, explaining not only how each task is performed, but also why. It provides practical guidance allowing you to safely take advantage of the advanced technology in PostGIS in order to simplify your spatial database administration tasks. Furthermore, you will learn to take advantage of basic and advanced vector, raster, and routing approaches along with the concepts of data maintenance, optimization, and performance, and will help you to integrate these into a large ecosystem of desktop and web tools. By the end, you will be armed with all the tools and instructions you need to both manage the spatial database system and make better decisions as your project's requirements evolve.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Creating WMS and WFS services with MapServer


In this recipe, you will see how to create a WMS and WFS from a PostGIS layer, using the popular MapServer open source web-mapping engine.

You will then use the services, testing their exposed requests, using first a browser and then a desktop tool such as QGIS (you could do this using other software, such as uDig, gvSIG, and OpenJUMP GIS).

Getting ready

Follow these steps before getting ready:

  1. Create a schema for this chapter within the postgis_cookbook database using the following command:
postgis_cookbook=# create schema chp09;
  1. Be sure to have Apache HTTP installed (MapServer will run on it as a CGI) and check whether it is working by visiting its home page at http://localhost (typically, an It works! message will be displayed if you still have not customized any features).
  2. Install MapServer as per its installation guide (http://mapserver.org/installation/index.html).

Note

A handy way to have MapServer up and running in Apache for Windows is to install...