Whoever it was, they apparently forgot to tell Christopher Schmidt. When you put OpenLayers together with his new WPServer application, several standard GIS operations are as easy as clicking a button. And WPServer is available under the same license as FeatureServer OpenLayers .

Here’s an animated GIF showing the fun I had playing around with the WPServer Demo:

What I did:

1. Added several polygons in stream mode representing the Mediterranean and islands
2. Ran a symmetric difference on all of these polygons, to create a single hole-y polygon
3. Smoothed (a bit too much) the polygon
4. Buffered the entire polygon
5. Generated a convex hull
6. Added another polygon (it looked too much like a mushroom to resist)
7. Buffered the new polygon
8. Dissolved the two polygons together
9. Replaced the dissolved polygon with a centroid
10. Buffered the centroid
11. Generalized (not as much this time) the polygon

What was the point? Well beyond having fun, just being able to create the initial complex hole-y polygon was something that I hadn’t seen in web-based GIS before. Very cool. All of the other operations were useful too, though maybe not so much in this example. Do yourself a favour and play around with it a bit.

What’s the downside? Christopher can no longer say that he doesn’t do GIS :)

-J