Modifying a Map’s Look and Feel

Summary

This chapter has led you through the intricacies of designing effective and visually pleasing maps through the manipulation of their graphical elements. When you’ve mastered the contents of this chapter, you’ll be able to create interactive, web-based mapping applications that can display all sorts of data that possesses spatial distribution. Although these maps are useful, you haven’t yet wrung all the utility from MapServer’s CGI interface.

Up to this point, the applications you’ve created have produced images and allowed you to explore those images at any scale. You haven’t yet been able to query the spatial data sets, however, and gain access to the wealth of information stored in them. The next chapter provides a detailed description of the MapServer query facility and takes you through the steps required to build an application that will give you access to all of MapServer’s query power.