RIMapperWMS readme, installation and setup

The currently published version of the RIMapperWMS system is 1.1 The previous 1.0 was the first fully functional version, that complies to the OGC WMS 1.1.1 Basic standard. That means it supports the GetCapabilities and GetMap interfaces with interactive SVG output, as well as static PNG and JPEG support for non-SVG clients. The 1.1 version adds the TimeMapper code to include a special layertype for animated point data (using declarative SMIL animation in SVG).

It is however a research-purpose WMS, not optimised on speed or throughput, and therefore not recommended for production systems that need to serve large amounts of maps to many customers!

If you want to install it on your own server, follow these steps:

  1. Make sure you have a database running that supports the OpenGeospatial consortium's Simple Features for SQL standard. The current RIMapperWMS version (1.1) has SQL statements and JDBC connections working for the PostGIS extension of PostgreSQL and for MySQL 4.1 and higher. Our setup and tests have until now only been extensive for PostGIS/PostgreSQL, as MySQL is lacking some OGC-SFS features, most notably a projection engine (as long as all your data is in the same spatial reference system that should be no problem, though).

  2. Setup a database schema with your geometric and attribute data. The simplest way is to download the example database SQL loadscript [ZIP archive of sql backup file], unzip and load it in your database system
    • For PostGIS/PostgreSQL, create a new database called "rimapper" with UTF-8 encoding (check the Postgres and/or PgAdmin documentation on how to do that). Execute the SQL load script. This can be done in several ways, eg.:
      • in PGadminIII, use the 'Restore...' menu and load the backup file;
      • use the command-line Postgres application pg_restore (in the postgres/bin directory).
    • For other SFS compatible databases, you will have to check how to create geometry type columns and might have to change the SQL script accordingly.
    • Note that the load script creates a DB user (or 'role') called 'rimapper' with password 'rimapper' that corresponds with the connection data in the file 'wms_instance.xml' inside the TomCat Webapps directory for RIMapper. When changing or adding DB priviliges and/or users for the RIMapper DB, you'll have to change this file accordingly (you can use the application in the system or sources directory "admin/DefineWMSInstance.html" for that).

      You can expand this database with your own data later. You can also build your own schema from scratch, as long as it adhers to this schema setup.


  3. Make sure you have a Webserver and a Java Servlet container running, or a combination of these, such as Apache Tomcat 6 (can be downloaded from the appropriate Apache project pages).
  4. Deploy the RIMapper web-application: We provide a ready packaged setup for Tomcat 6.x. Download the appropriate RIMapper.war file [WAR file for Tomcat 6.x], unzip it and deploy it in your servlet container. In Tomcat you can do this by going to the Tomcat Manager (from your Tomcat home page or directly to http://localhost:8080/manager/html/) and choosing the RIMapper.war file in "Select WAR file to upload" and click 'Deploy'. After this the RIMapper system will be set up in the Tomcat webapplication directory (see details).  Although these .war packages have been made for Tomcat, you can use them as a starting point for most other servlet containers (eg. JBoss, glassFish) ; You might have to edit some content after unpacking - refer to the appropriate documentation of your servlet container. Alternatively use the source files and re-compile for your system of choice....

  5. Edit the settings, behaviour and styling of the WMS by changing the appropriate database entries, as explained in the database setup page.
If you want to further develop the system or tweak it, feel free to download the sources [61 Kb zip] and look at the JavaDoc documentation.

Like these webpages, the system is released as Open Source under a CC-license.


Barend Köbben - last changes 22-Feb-2013
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