Hello All: I have an idea to improve our mapserver instance, and I come to you asking for help formulating an approach to realizing it.
What I want is retrieve elevation data from DEM/LIDAR. I have attempted keyword searches for various combination of MapServer+DEM+LIDAR without much success. I am using MapServer 5.4.2 from the MS4W package. I have access to elevation data in the form of USGS DEM rasters, either from 1:24000 quads or from a much denser (and far larger) LIDAR dataset. The quad DEM dataset consists of just under 1000 quads stored as individual .dem files, in what appears to be 16-bit signed integer format, each file with a unique name equal to the USGS quad code. Files appear to be 1-2 megs in size on disk. The LIDAR dataset appears to use a 32-bit float format, there are over 3500 quarter-quads stored as individual .dem files with unique names that do not correspond directly to the USGS quarter-quad code (but I can possibly generate a lookup table for the translation). Alternatively the LIDAR data is available as CSV format. Files are quite large, 10-12 megs for the rasters and 150 megs for the CSVs. Each. I am not (yet) interested in displaying the data as an image, only returning the point values at any given location on the displayed map. We are using Geomoose2 for our front-end, but I'll work on the display of the data once I determine how best to "generate" it. There are no services (e.g. WMS) published by our MapServer instance. How should I (can I? do I need to?) approach crafting a mapserver file that points to 3500+ individual rasters? Am I thinking all wrong about this? This is very likely. Should I just forget about the whole thing? Can it even be done in a reasonable way? Please opine at will on this subject. Thanks! /Johan. ---------------------- Johan Forsman Geologist Safe Drinking Water Program Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals Office of Public Health Telephone: 225.342.7309 Telefax: 225.342.7303 _______________________________________________ mapserver-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/mapserver-users
