Visualisation of a Military Topographic Spatial Database with use of GIS Servers

The paper presents an analysis of the possibilities of automated data visualisation with use of GIS servers provided under an Open Source licence - Mapserver and Geoserver. The visualisation process uses a Vector Map Level 2 (VML2) that corresponds, in terms of information content to a Military Topographic Map in a scale of 1:50 000. Data visualisation was performed by means of developing the relevant scripts. The objective was to obtain a visualisation result, that would be as similar as possible to an analogue topographic map of the M755 series. The automated visualisation was analysed by comparing each map symbol, developed in both tested GIS servers and juxtaposing it with the instruction for manual editing M755 series maps. The obtained maps are displayed in form of an interactive geoportal. The authors analysed the time of generating corresponding map fragments at various parameters (area size, number of requests processed simultaneously and the number of required layers). The results of the analysis demonstrate that the discussed GIS servers present the map symbols from the analogue map correctly in more than 90% of cases. The tests of map generating time showed a significant advantage of Geoserver, which was better than the Mapserver software in nearly all cases.