Publishing Maps to Mobile Devices and the Web

Question

I have a bunch of agricultural information stored in a local postgis database. We use qgis to manipulate/analyze this information and to print output.

I would like to publish this information (both raster and vector layers) so that it can be loaded as a layer on both mobile devices and web browsers. The information to be displayed needs to be a function of the user that is logged in. It also must be able to interact with the gps on end users mobile devices. I would like to host all of the data to be published on the web offsite because my upload bandwith is terrible.

In the past I have saved vectors as .kml files and loaded them into google maps for users, but this strategy seems to have problems when displaying large datasets.

I'm comfortable doing a large amount of development work but am also willing to pay for solutions that save me time and headaches.

After researching this project for a couple of days I've found that there are about a million ways to do this.

Any help narrowing down my options would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Apart from the GPS interaction. MangoMap can do all of this without writing a single line of code. Just use ogr2ogr to export your PostGIS layers as shapefiles, then upload the shapefile to Mango and create the map, you'll probably be up and running in an hour.

Answer 2

TouchGeo from MapDotNet handles these requirements out of the box.

See here: http://www.mapdotnet.com/index.php/mapdotnet-ux-product-overview/mapdotnet-for-dynamics-crm-2011/what-is-touchgeo

To address each concern:

I would like to publish this information (both raster and vector layers)

MapDotNet UX9 can render the PostGIS data directly to tiles to overlay a raster tile collection. The collection could be pre-buil from your aerials or you could use a consumer-based map service like bing or google for your basemap.

so that it can be loaded as a layer on both mobile devices and web browsers.

TouchGeo uses the tiles rendered by MapDotNet UX9 in a HTML5 canvas embedded in a KendoUI mobile application (http://demos.kendoui.com/mobile/overview/index.html) so it works on HTML5 enabled mobile and web browsers.

The information to be displayed needs to be a function of the user that is logged in.

TouchGeo has a framework for user authentication, but the filtering by user (or role or something else) requires a small amount of customization.

It also must be able to interact with the gps on end users mobile devices.

This is built into HTML5 using navigation.geolocation.getCurrentPosition() (or watchPosition()) with enableHighAccuarcy enabled in the position options.

I would like to host all of the data to be published on the web offsite because my upload bandwith is terrible.

MapDotNet UX9 is built in C#/.NET, so a windows server is required. Windows Azure or Amazon AWS are viable options.

In the past I have saved vectors as .kml files and loaded them into google maps for users, but this strategy seems to have problems when displaying large datasets.

Since MapDotNet UX9 uses its own custom renderers, it is able to handle much larger data sets. It renders the data into tiles instead of rendering each data point or polygon individually.

Hope this helps :)