Web Services – WMS, WCS, and WFS

Our WMS,WCS,and WFS services are powered by a combination of Mapserver, GDAL/OGR, and Proj4 . We do extensive data preparation work using scripts written in Ruby and keep our inventory information in a PostgreSQL database with the PostGIS spatial extensions. The vast majority of our data being served is stored as tiled, deflate compressed, GeoTiffs.

Tiled Services

We served data to tiled clients like Google Maps, Google Earth, and other tiled base mapping tool kits using a custom tile server application. It is written in Ruby and uses Mongrel in combination with Rack as the web server engine. Image processing is performed with the Ruby language bindings to ImageMagick.

Web map interface

The Online Map Viewer is built using Ruby on Rails on the server side and ExtJS for the web interface. Authentication is done using OpenID to provide a secure, distributed and single-sign-on access to the application. Google Maps is used to visualize GIS data, project locations and satellite imagery that is provided through the GINA/SDMI WMS services. These sites are running on multiple Linux servers using CentOS 5.3 as the Operating System along with Apache, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, and Passenger services.