MapSnack - geospatial virtual appliance
Welcome to MapSnack
Intro
Virtualisation is an emerging technology on x86 platform simplifying deployment and
configuration of complex information technologies. In free and open source software for
geoinformatics area, however, this trend is not yet fully reflected or leveraged.
Paper introduce results and epxeriences with FOSS geospatial virtual appliance
called 'MapSnack'.MapSnack is fully pre-installed and pre-configured geospatial web
server that runs on any standard x86 machine in a self-contained, isolated
environment.
Penetration of FOSS for geoinformatics can be speeded up with use of standard
virtual appliances thus minimizing time for installation and basic configurations
and maximizing focus on building up FOSS geospatial web solutions, related
workflows and integration with ERP systems. Moreover abstraction from particular
virtualisation platform can be achieved with universal small boot CD with
compressed file system installation on choosen virtual platform.
MapSnack high availability might be used together with appropriate tutorials as
educational package for learning OGC standards and related geospatial products such
as UMN Mapserver, GRASS, GDAL, etc)
What is MapSnack
a portable OGC compliant map server in a form of virtual appliance. the term 'snack' means 'fast', 'ready to use' even 'emergency use'
MapSnack objectives
- enable immediate or emergency usage of geospatial services
- system maintenance through appliances (and its snapshots)
- 'off-line' geospatial services
- portable OGC server
- encapsulating data with functionality
- leverage SOA and SaaS rather than pure ASP
- supplemental way to binary distros
What MapSnack does
- MapSnack serves georeferenced map layers (vector or raster based) to the browser.
- MapSnack is ready to be deployed as OGC compliant web server geospatial appliance serving or consuming other WMS or WFS services
Current content of MapSnack - UVAC edition
- Apache-2.2.2
- PHP-5.1.4
- GDAL-1.3.1
- PROJ-4.4.9
- GRASS-6.0.2
- MapServer-4.8.3
- MapLab-2.2.1
- ka-map-0.2.0
- p.mapper-1.9.5 beta
MapSnack is running on Debian sarge 3.1r2 in text mode only