Saturday, May 12, 2012

uDig web map tiles enhancements

Many of you for sure know that uDig has the ability to show Web Map Tiles.

From the import dialog you select Web Map Tiles:


push the next button and find a long list of available web map tile servers (which we should probably check).


There is also the possibility to select a custom server. This is very handy, but had 2 problems:
- it could not load local folders of files
- it understood only the google tile schema numbering, which means no TMS

Well, this is the first enhancement. Those two problems were solved. Mind that you will have to check the right option:


The second enhancement will make uDig Spatial Toolbox users happy. With the next uDig release we will also release the module that creates TMS folders from a set of layers. I do not want to go into detail shere, but a new module will allow to export a set of styled layers as tiles folder. Those tiles come with the complete description of the zoom levels and so on.

In fact since that file is the only thing needed to load a folder of tiles, it made sense to add a small item to the list, the JGrasstools TMS folder:


And there we have it. Push the button, push, push the button and:


This will be extrememly helpful for those like us that use uDig with BeeGIS field extensions out in the field on netbooks. The base dataset gets extremely lightweight to load and rasters can be prepared to be fast and easy.


4 comments:

Jody Garnett said...

You missed one - you can now treat any WMS as a tile set!

http://udig.refractions.net/confluence/display/EN/Tileset+page

moovida said...

Would be nice if those tiles could be cached to disk. :)

Unknown said...

The US Census announced a TIGER Web Map Service (WMS) today.

"Users who have a [GIS/mapping] client that supports the Web Map Service standard may access the TIGERweb service at ."

There is also a web browser interface to the TIGER map system
See video at this link
http://tigerweb.geo.census.gov

Unknown said...

Below the video at
http://tigerweb.geo.census.gov

There is information on the WMS

"TIGER data on the web is released following the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) Web Map Service (WMS) standard. Users that have a client that supports the WMS standard may access the TIGERweb service using the following URL:

//tigerweb.geo.census.gov/ArcGIS/services/tigerWMS/MapServer/WMSServer
"