MapServer

MapServer is an open source platform for publishing spatial data and interactive mapping applications to the web. MapServer allows you to render data from TileDB arrays and combine other sources and formats such as GeoJSON to render cartographic quality maps.

Installation

You can run the MapServer and TileDB examples as follows;

docker run -it --rm -u 0 -v /local/path:/data tiledb/tiledb-geospatial /bin/bash

MapServer configuration

We will use the following MapServer mapfile;

MAP
  IMAGETYPE      PNG
  SIZE           400 300
  EXTENT         -77.8751 34.1472 -77.7869 34.267
  CONFIG         "TILEDB_CONFIG" "./aws.config"

  PROJECTION
    "init=epsg:4326"
  END

  WEB
    METADATA
      "wms_title" "TileDB tutorial"
      "wms_onlineresource" "https://myhost/mapserv"
      "wms_enable_request" "*"
    END
  END
  
  LAYER
    NAME    "tiledb_coastal"
    TYPE    RASTER
    DATA    "s3://tiledb-mapserver/tiledb_mosaic"
    CONNECTIONOPTIONS
      "TILEDB_CONFIG" "aws.config"
    END
    OFFSITE 0 0 0
    PROJECTION
      "init=epsg:4326"
    END
    METADATA
      "wms_title" "TileDB Sample 2017 NOAA NGS Ortho-rectified Oblique Imagery of the East Coast"
    END
  END # tiledb_coastal raster layer ends here

END # end of map file

And sample data from https://coast.noaa.gov/dataviewer/#/, in this case the 2017 NOAA NGS Ortho-rectified Oblique Imagery of the East Coast.

The use of CONNECTIONOPTIONS is in the MapServer 8.0 release.

The following GDAL commands are used to produce a single tiledb array from multiple sources.

gdalbuildvrt mosaic.vrt *.tif
gdal_translate -OF TILEDB -CO COMPRESSION=ZSTD -CO BLOCKXSIZE=1024 -CO BLOCKYSIZE=1024 mosaic.vrt tiledb_mosaic

As in our TileDB and GDAL tutorials, we store the S3 credentials in an aws.config file. Note that this aws.config file should be stored in a location that is accessible by your web server but is not public.

To test rendering a map with MapServer we use the shp2img command;

shp2img -m tutorial.map -l tiledb_coastal -e -77.82 34.17 -77.80 34.20 -s 250 250  -o ~/Desktop/test.png -map_debug 3

We have tested this mapfile on an AWS m5a.2xlarge instance and successfully created a map from a query to a TileDB array stored on S3.