Oracle 9iAS map viewer
Liujian Qian, Frank Lee, and Jayant Sharma
Spatial Products, Oracle Corporation
1 Oracle Drive, Nashua, NH 03062, USA
{lj.qian, frank.lee, jayant.sharma}@oracle.com
Introduction
Geographic data has traditionally been managed in proprietary files and displayed using special GIS applications. Oracle Spatial, a component of the Oracle server since, provides an open geographic data management solution. MapViewer complements Oracle Spatial by providing a generic web-based means of delivering and viewing any geographic data managed by Oracle Spatial. E-business applications developed by Oracle and other parties can now better utilize the massive amount of geographic data available. Location-based services developers, local public data publishers, and other users can easily integrate MapViewer into their web-based solutions.
A map request submitted to MapViewer must contain a data source name, a map name, a location indicating the center point of the map, a map size or scale, and a result format. The data source and map name identify the map metadata.
Mapping metadata is crucial in determining the looks and styles of generated maps. It includes map symbols, text fonts, area and line patterns, styling rules that associate spatial tables with map layers or themes, and base map definitions. Different users can define their private metadata, or can share other user's mapping metadata. For instance, an organization can define a set of commonly used map symbols to be shared by many departments' users. Each department can then define its own map layers and base maps using the shared map symbols. The Map Definition Tool is a standalone Java program that should be used to create, modify, and manage a user's mapping metadata stored in a database.
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 describes how MapViewer is accessed from a client program, Section 3 explains the various map metadata (styles, themes, and maps) required by MapViewer, Section 4 describes the XML request and response format. Section 5 describes the Map Definition Tool used for creating and maintaining map metadata and finally Section 6 summarizes this paper.
Accessing MapViewer from a client
This section then illustrates how to interact with MapViewer from a client (a Java program or a JSP page). For illustrative purposes, we assume that MapViewer is up and running, and that a data source named mvdemo has been defined for MapViewer. Once a MapViewer instance is running in Oracle 9iAS or OC4J, it can be accessed through a service URL, for example http://foo.com/mapviewer/omserver.