Choice: an important thing, especially if you’re short of time and other valuable resources, especially during crisis situations. I mentioned sometime back that the goal of the SahanaGIS work was to allow existing GIS users, using existing technologies, to make use of the system without disrupting the flow:The GIS catalog is an important part of this..

The Sahana GIS catalog is an administrative module within Sahana that allows users to configure geographical data/feeds. It attempts to provide users with a somewhat intuitive interface to configure various layers, which in turn can be viewed by the Sahana GIS client which uses OpenLayers. Support for newer ‘types’ of layers/feeds are added frequently: our goal is to support quite a few of these in the near future.

At the time of writing, the following are configurable and thus usable from within Sahana: OpenStreetMap (both Mapnik and Osmarenderer), remote and local TMS layers, remote and local WMS layers, Commercial Mapping APIs: GoogleMaps, YahooMaps, Microsoft Virtual Earth, Multimap, and feeds: GeoRSS and KML. The files layer can be used to upload and use the following: KML, GML, OSM. WMS and TMS layers accept multiple layers within them. Layers can be enabled by the administrator so that they are visible within the OL mapping client by default. This works perfectly for data from custom mapping servers: either local or remote. Maps served as WMS via mapping servers such as UMN/Mapserver can be accessed by configuring the WMS layer in the GIS catalog. Likewise, tiles from TileCache and the likes can be accessed by configuring TMS to point to them. In turn, the configured layers are displayed within the mapping client, depending on their visibility settings. There are a lot of items on the roadmap as well: including WFS support… Check out the Sahana GIS Infrastructure Roadmap to see what we’re upto…