USB Metacarta stick

So the biggest benefit about being at WhereCamp so far is getting a USB stick from crshhmidt (James has already covered some of it). Man he has packed a great bunch on a small space. It is a great way again to get started. Ahh the riches of the OpenSource world. He has written featureserver to be a great and simple API to mapping data in a ton-o-formats ™. He has a demo that both publishes and accepts KML. It has a great REST API for featureserver which allows you to say /<layer>/<feature> or  /layer/feature/with a bunch of parameters.

Another cool feature is the ability to get the featureserver to give back attribute data in html format. So if you have shapefile or other geodata source being served through featureserver your url ends in .html and you get all the attribute data for those features in a standard html page. Can you say hello google bot indexing all your attribute data. You can control the template behind the page and get it to point to the data source. This is great for “show me all the data sets which talk about Central Park”.

The configuration files are just plain text files with a structure similar to an apache config file – which is easy cheezy to understand.

Hats off to Chris for putting together a sweet little get going in an easy way  dem/application on a stick