Underlying technology

Web Maps uses EMu Web Service components to:

• Collect and collate dynamic data, such as specimen location information.
• Display appropriate geographical data or layers, e.g. topographic maps, rivers, satellite images, etc.
• Produce an XML description of the combined spatial information, including urls that link to images that display rendered maps, legends and scales, etc.

We provide stylesheets that enable this XML information to display as a well featured, interactive, browser based mapping client, typically used as part of a website that publishes data, in particular specimen data.

Web Maps can be configured and customised to use a number of spatial data sources for map layers, including standard ESRI Shapefiles, Raster images and 'real-time' WMS layers. In addition, depending on how the underlying Map engine is installed, it can read a large number of common GIS spatial data formats (including those from ArcGIS, Mapinfo and others).

The Mapping engine used is MapServer, an open source environment for building spatially aware Internet applications. MapServer was originally developed by the University of Minnesota in cooperation with NASA and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources and is widely used for developing web based mapping systems. The open source project receives funding from a number of organisations world wide and is still being actively developed and maintained.

MapServer must be installed on your institution's web server in order for Web Maps to operate. There is no charge made by either Mapserver or by us for obtaining the required Mapserver system.

Note: We do not supply or install MapServer but does provide installation instructions and can assist clients installing and configuring it on request.