WestNileVirus.gov: Using the University of Minnesota MapServer 4.0, PHP, and MySQL to present West Nile Virus GIS Information.

Geoffrey Rowland
Office of Global Programs

West Nile Virus (WNV) has been in the eastern U.S. since the summer of 1999 and has subsequently spread across the rest of the continental U.S. The virus can infect humans, birds, mosquitoes, horses and some other mammals. In response to Congressional inquiries, and growing concern over the health and economic impact of WNV the government agencies involved in the research, data collection, and management of WNV established a Task Force to coordinate certain WNV related activities.

The Climate Information Project (CIP) based at NOAA’s Office of Global Programs is providing technical support for http://westnilevirus.gov. One aspect of this is providing a web based mapping application. Our web based mapping application is built on the open source mapping tool MapServer 4.0, developed by the University of Minnesota and NASA. MapServer has a PHP interface called PHPMapScript, which when used in conjunction with a database such as MySQL, allows mapping of dynamic data. In addition to using these open source tools, we use a commercial product called Feature Manipulation Engine (FME) developed by Safe Software. This allows us to translate multiple GIS formats into a format that MapServer can understand.

The presentation will show off the west nile virus mapping application, as well as the westnilevirus.gov website. Discussion will include problems we ran into, and plans for the future, such as adding more data sources.