Jared Chapiewsky, a web systems developer at Earth Information Technologies, Corp., demonstrated how to use open source tools to publish and explore GIS data and maps on February 27 at the 2008 Wisconsin Land Information Association Annual Conference in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

A practical, hands-on departure from the usual emphasis on PowerPoint slides, Jared Chapiewsky and his colleagues AJ Wortley, State Cartographer's Office, and David Hart, UW-Sea Grant, went through the concepts behind web mapping mashups, clients, and standards-based web services. Conference participants were encouraged to go through the actual steps involved in creating such services with the presenters using USB drives that were donated by Earth Information Technologies Corp., of Madison.

"We wanted participants to get some hands on experience creating web services, even

allowing them to use their own data and make it portable so they could take it with them back to their organization and illustrate the power of these web mapping tools", said Jared Chapiewsky. "Many organizations aren't set up to share spatial data effectively. We wanted to teach people easy ways to publish spatial data in standards-based formats using open source technology, so it can be readily used and leveraged within and outside of an organization."

Chapiewsky and his colleagues demonstrated how such technology can be enabled using Keyhole Markup Language (KML), which is used in Google Earth, or other formats such as web mapping services (WMS) or web feature services (WFS). "Our focus was on Mapserver, but we also showed Featureserver, as well as web mapping clients like UDig and QGIS", Chapiewsky related. "We chose these technologies because they are open source and they can easily be run directly from a UBS key."

Chapiewsky and his colleagues hope to enable technical GIS experts, and other conference attendees, to communicate the benefits of new advances in web mapping to management decision makers in their organizations.