MapServer

Known as one of the fastest mapping engines in the world, MapServer is an Open Source platform for publishing spatial data and interactive mapping applications to the web. Originally developed in the mid-1990’s at the University of Minnesota, MapServer is released under an MIT-style license, and runs on all major platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X).

MapServer is written in C and is widely known as one of the fastest mapping engines in the world. It is supported by a diverse group of organizations that fund enhancements and maintenance, and is administered within OSGeo by the MapServer Project Steering Committee. MapServer is driven by a very vibrant and helpful Open Source community

Core features

  • Easily Publish Data

    • Access hundreds of raster and vector data formats through GDAL/OGR
    • Support of numerous Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards
    • On-the-fly projections support through PROJ.4 library

  • Fully Customizable for your Needs

    • Support for popular scripting and development environments (PHP, Python, .NET, Perl, etc.)
    • Lightweight

  • Tile Caching through MapCache

    • Apache module, super-fast
    • Sub-Project of MapServer

  • Advanced Cartography

    • Easily configured through .map files
    • Label collision engine
    • Dynamic heatmaps
    • Multiple renderers (AGG, Cairo)
    • SVG symbols

Implemented Standards

  • Filter Encoding (FE)
  • Geographic JSON (GeoJSON)
  • Georeferenced Tagged Image File Format (GeoTIFF)
  • Geography Markup Language (GML)
  • Keyhole Markup Language (KML)
  • OpenStreetMap (OSM)
  • Styled Layer Descriptor (SLD)
  • Sensor Observation Service (SOS)
  • Web Coverage Service (WCS)
  • Web Feature Service (WFS)
  • Wep Map Context (WMC)
  • Web Map Service (WMS)
MapServer 7 leveraging OpenStreetMap data

Service Providers

Core contributors

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