Babysteps into GIS
Yesterday, I started looking into GIS. My current needs are simple. I simply need to show some data on a map - map of US would do just fine. The data can be very diverse, and is mostly available as simple matrices. For example, here is a sample I can think of:
- Offices around the country. I guess these would show up as simply dots on a map. Office data is available with postal address.
- People around the country. This might show up as a distribution over the map.
- Status reports. ie., Is the network up/down/slow in some area? This might be very useful for travelling folks.
At the moment, I know nothing about GIS. But it is impressive, and intuitive.
Well, first stop was at DMOZ. Then I moved on to FreeGIS, OpenGIS. Took a look at ESRI too.
Got University of Minnesota MapServer installed. It is a free open-source server. Comes with a demo. Pretty neat. Has bindings for Perl, Python, PHP etc. A pretty good tutorial explaining the concepts for the previous version got me some insights. More tutorials about GIS with some broken links 
GISDevelopment.net has a good intro.
Ideally, I would like to cook up something like the service explained in WMS Cookbook. With some help from USPS to convert Zipcodes to lat/longs, I should be able to provide a simple interface where people can upload a spreadsheet of data that gets converted to layers for superimposing on a map. May be this is just a pipe-dream? I don't know enought to judge 
There might be some commercial product that does all this out of the box, but that probably wouldn't help me learn.
I think I get general idea about shape files and maps. Need to find more about how to create data files.
By the way, my employer has a very active GIS site open to public. Check it out, if you are interested in biodiversity and conservation data.
gis
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"I should be able to provide a simple interface where people can upload a spreadsheet of data that gets converted to layers for superimposing on a map."
I have worked a bit with a product called Dynamic Maps and it does what you have mentioned pretty well. Its not free, though the map viewer client is free. see http://www.skeinc.com
(They have all their products available for trial downloads...)
Posted by: Ashok on July 2, 2003 02:27 AM