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Serving Southeast Asia Topographic Atlas on the Web - An Open Source Free Software Approach

SONG XianFeng and KONO Yasuyuki
Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University

This paper presents an online topographic atlas using Open Source Free Software. Our intention is to provide a more effective means of locating and accessing our valuable topographic map collections, which covers Vietnam, Laos, Burma, Cambodia, and part of Thailand, with a scale of 1:50,000 and 1:100,000. The atlas system consists of four part: 1) PostgreSQL/PostGIS was the database system hosting all the collections; 2) Minnesota MapServer, plus Vector Map Level 0, served a geo-location index map for online browsing collections; 3) Isite server collaborated the collection database with a Z39.50 geo-gateway, i.e. Geographic Survey Institute, Japan, to promote sharing; 4) ZETA Perl and the MapServer together constructed a Z39.50-compliant gateway that can search data of interest within a visually defined geographic area of coverage on a map. Our work proved the possibility of using free geo-informatics technologies for an operational legacy system. We hope there may be some lessons learned from our efforts that could be applied elsewhere for similar processes.