Refractions Adds PostGIS Support to Mapserver

Refractions Research announced today that the University of Minnesota Mapserver, an open-source web mapping tool, now supports reading GIS data directly from the PostGIS/PostgreSQL spatial database.

"We are very excited to have helped add spatial database support to Mapserver", said lead developer Dave Blasby, "Using open-source tools has allowed us to build a complete system, from concept to internet mapper, in just a few months."

The changes to Mapserver add a new data source type to the program, allowing it to retrieve GIS features from the PostGIS/PostgreSQL spatial database in "well-known binary" format. The features are then passed to the built-in rendering routines for processing. Mapserver may also use attributes from the spatial database to filter the features before rendering and provide different stylings.

Support for Mapserver is included in the version 0.5 release of PostGIS. For more information about PostGIS, and using PostGIS with Mapserver, see the main PostGIS project page at http://postgis.refractions.net.