Dear GeoServer developers,
I am currently investigating a feasibility to adopt GeoServer (also GIS tools, GDAL, the file formats and so on) for a histology imaging purposes. If you take a look at this image you will find it very similar to a map with a coverage image. Unfortunately my background is not cartography (I’m from 3D visualization field - OpenGL/Java3D), so my assertions below might look silly from a professional point of view. Please correct them if they are wrong.
To be short: we deal with an images of an animal brain slices produced by a microscope. These images are huge (~800M Tiled TIFF, JPEG compressed) and there are many of them. We want them to be spatially referenced and kept in a database. Reading GeoServer tutorials and documentation I found out that a lot of the features can be used/adopted by us. Examples:
- Displaying huge image files - mosaic plug-in, AJAX viewer.
- Storing spatial data together with the image itself - GeoTIFF, ECW, world file etc.
- Overlay drawings and labeling - same, for example, as streets or state borders.
- Search capabilities - connection to a database is provided.
- ?
So far so good. My main concern is the following: our images are arbitrary located in 3D space (but they are always flat rectangles). Here come the questions:
- Can GeoServer handle 3D spacial referencing? Or maybe it can be emulated somehow?
- Is it possible to keep functioning the features mentioned above for 3D space?
- If 1) and/or 2) are/is false, it is much work to implement it?
- Maybe there is a project which can already do this?
Any hints and comments are appreciated.
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Best regards
Dmitri Darine
Neural Systems and Graphics Computing Laboratory
University of Oslo