Hi, I am quite new to GIS and mapserver.
I have written software, let's call it "bitia", that outputs a map of temperature in a GeoTIFF; each hour it produces a new one. I need to serve this map with mapserver, so that other software can get it and do more work with it. I am generally at a loss on how to manage times. Initially I thought I'd put the timestamp in the filenames: temperature-2014-09-09-16-00.tif temperature-2014-09-09-17-00.tif temperature-2014-09-09-18-00.tif ... Then I thought that this might be suboptimal so I changed it to this: temperature-0000.tif <- Latest temperature-0001.tif <- Last but one temperature-0002.tif <- ... The system renames the files one position down each time it produces a new one, and stores the times inside the file, in a GDAL metadata item named TIMESTAMP. Now, after reading about tile indexes [1], WMS Time [2], and WCS spatio/temporal indexes [3], I conclude that my original idea was probably better. So I'm thinking I will have the system work thus: 1. Have bitia produce GeoTIFF files with the timestamp in the file name. 2. Use gdaltindex to create a tile index of these files. 3. Write a script to add the timestamp of the files to the dbf of the tile index. 4. Have mapserver serve these files with WCS/WMS. Could you please tell me if I'm on the right track? I've been experimenting with the above but I haven't found a way for the WMS/WCS client to ask "tell me for which times you have data", and I will probably have more questions once I start implementing it. Thanks! [1] http://mapserver.org/optimization/tileindex.html [2] http://mapserver.org/ogc/wms_time.html [3] http://mapserver.org/ogc/wcs_server.html#spatio-temporal-indexes _______________________________________________ mapserver-users mailing list mapserver-users@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/mapserver-users