WMS Server Documentation

This is the starting page for Josh's experimental WMS server project.

This WMS server project is a generic backend for serving geospacial image data, intended for the use case of generating cartographic visualizations like color-coded charts, rather than navigational maps.

More information...

• Maps served by this server can be viewed with any WMS-compatible map viewer. Example uses you can see here are:
  • OpenLayers example
  • Google Maps API example
• Several layers exist on this server that you can try viewing by modifying the examples above. These layers color the regions arbitrarily, but attempting to prevent adjacent regions from having the same color.

  Layer Name	Description
  states	U.S. states
  cd-110	U.S. congressional districts 2007-2008
  counties	U.S. counties
  countysubs	U.S. towns (generally incorporated)
  cdps	U.S. towns (generally unincorporated, "Census Data Places")
  sldl	U.S. state legislative districts, lower chamber (current in Jan 2008)
  sldu	U.S. state legislative districts, upper chamber (current in Jan 2008)
  zipcodes	U.S. census ZCTAs (approximations of zipcodes)

• Remember that layers (style info) and geometry are kept separate in this system. You can make your own layers based on the existing geometry datasets that have already been uploaded. The geometry datasets that are already available are:

  Dataset Identifier	Description
  http://www.rdfabout.com/rdf/usgov/us/states	U.S. states
  http://www.rdfabout.com/rdf/usgov/congress/house/110	U.S. congressional districts 2007-2008
  http://www.rdfabout.com/rdf/usgov/us/counties	U.S. counties
  http://www.rdfabout.com/rdf/usgov/us/countysubs	U.S. towns (generally incorporated)
  http://www.rdfabout.com/rdf/usgov/us/cdps	U.S. towns (generally unincorporated, "Census Data Places")
  http://www.rdfabout.com/rdf/usgov/us/sld/lower	U.S. state legislative districts, lower chamber (current in Jan 2008)
  http://www.rdfabout.com/rdf/usgov/us/sld/upper	U.S. state legislative districts, upper chamber (current in Jan 2008)
  http://www.rdfabout.com/rdf/usgov/us/zctas	U.S. census ZCTAs (approximations of zipcodes)

  The fact that the dataset identifiers are URLs is entirely incidental (though not without reason).
• You can color the datasets above according to your own needs using the upload-styles.cgi API method. See the section "Uploading a Layer" in the API documentation. You can use your own uploader or this form to upload style data. You'll need to provide the identifiers of regions that make up the dataset you choose. See the "Listing Regions in a Dataset or Layer" section of the API documentation for how to do that (example for U.S. congressional districts).
• It is also possible to upload your own geometry, in order for you to create layers for different regions than already exist on the server. To do this, use the upload-geometry.cgi API method. See the section "Uploading a Dataset" in the API documentation. You can use your own uploader or this form to upload geometry data.
• In order to create a new layer or dataset, you will need an API key, which is just used to make sure you don't modify other people's data. Please contact me to get one. The "test" API key can be used to modify the layer named "test" and the dataset named "test", and you can view the results on the test layer example page. Feel free to play.
• The source code for this project is maintained in a Subversion repository at URL svn://occams.info/viz/wms and can be browsed.