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MetaCarta Labs is our playground: a way to demonstrate ideas before they're ready for prime time. We want to hear what you do with them, and what you think we should do next.
MetaCarta provides a bridge between document systems and mapping systems. It makes your repositories of unstructured text automatically accessible to any geographic information system (GIS) or browser-based mapping system. Typical MetaCarta deployments involve document repositories such as relational database systems (e.g. Oracle and DB2), Documentum, Windows shared drives, single web servers, intranets with many web servers, message traffic systems, and streaming news wires.
MetaCarta GTS, MetaCarta GTS geOdrive, and MetaCarta GeoTagger offer a service oriented architecture (SOA). MetaCarta GTS and GTS geOdrive feature SOAP, JSON, and KML Search APIs. Out-of-the-box, GTS and GTS geOdrive can display search results in ESRI ArcMap, Google Earth, and OpenLayers AJAX portals.
To facilitate the use of geospatial SOA, MetaCarta has released three open source projects that facilitate integration and rapid development:
- OpenLayers is an AJAX toolkit for combining data layers from many sources, including WMS and WFS.
- TileCache is a geographically aware image cache that accelerates WMS, ArcIMS, and other map servers.
- FeatureServer sits on top of any database and translates between vector formats, such as WFS, GeoRSS, GeoJSON, and KML.
Take a look at OpenLayers
OpenLayers makes it easy to put a dynamic map in any web page. It can display map tiles and markers loaded from any source. MetaCarta developed the initial version of OpenLayers and gave it to the public to further the use of geographic information of all kinds. OpenLayers is completely free, Open Source JavaScript, released under the BSD License.
Check out project Gutenkarte
Gutenkarte is a geographic text browser, intended to help readers explore the spatial component of classic works of literature.
View additional projects as they're released and keep up with the latest through the MetaCarta Labs Weblog.
These include: TileCache - WMS-C Server Implementation; MetaCarta Map Rectifier
"...If you're running MapServer as a WMS without any WFS requirements, you've gotta check out TileCache. This is, without a doubt, the best way to use MapServer on the web. The WSGI support is my favorite new feature as it provides a simple and effective protocol for implementing custom request and authentication handlers. In Python. It's 2007, do you really want a C program answering the internet phone when it rings?"
– Sean Gillies
A programmer for the Ancient World Mapping Center at UNC-Chapel Hill
blog entry February 10, 2007