A1: Oral Presentation C Thursday, 10:30 – 11:00 am C Gooseberry Falls Room

Internet Mapping on a Budget

Blaine Hackett
PlanSight LLC
2179 4th Street
White Bear Lake, MN  55110
blaine@plansight.com 

Internet Map Servers are becoming the rage and giving non-GIS'ers access to powerful mapping capabilities. Many groups want this technology to disseminate information to its clients. In the case of cities, its clients are Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Public.

While small cities can't afford the more expensive and robust Internet Mapping solutions they still deem this activity as important to their everyday tasks. So, there must be a way to give them this capability within their limited budgets.

Enter MapServer. MapServer is a free software originally developed by the University of Minnesota for building “spatially enabled Internet applications”. Although MapServer is becoming more sophisticated with a variety of ways to do custom scripting, the beauty is the relative ease of setup and creation of simple Internet mapping.

This session will address the technical aspects of MapServer, some basic customization and highlight a Municipal Internet Mapping solution.