Press Release MapServer 5.0

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Contact: Steve Lime, Chair, MapServer Project Steering Committee Email: steve.lime@dnr.state.mn.us

MapServer 5.0 Released

Seattle, Washington, USA, July 19 — The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) announced today that version 5.0 of the open source web mapping platform MapServer is now available for download from the project website (mapserver.gis.umn.edu). MapServer 5.0 is the first major release release since version 4.0 in July of 2003. While there have been regular releases every 6 months or so this is the first time developers felt the new feature set warranted the "major release" label. The new version includes dozens of small bug fixes, enhancements and performance improvements. Among the new features are: style and label attribute attribute binding; lookup table-based raster color correction; dynamic charting (pie and bar); explicit label prioritizing; enhanced debugging and logging; dynamic allocation for layers, classes, styles and symbols; improved memory management and garbage collection for MapScript; numerous improvements for OGC service support.

Perhaps the most important new feature is support for map rendering using the Anti-grain Geometry (AGG) graphics library (www.antigrain.com). AGG brings high quality 2-D rendering capabilities to MapServer that will allow users to create maps with vastly improved cartographic quality. Equally important is that using AGG results in a minimal reduction in performance in many cases. All symbology supported by the default GD (www.libgd.org) graphics library are also supported using AGG. The development team is excited about the future possibilities of bringing high-end cartography to on-demand web mapping.

About MapServer

MapServer is an open source development environment for building spatially-enabled web mapping applications and services. It is fast, flexible, reliable and can be integratated into just about any GIS environment. Originally developed at the University of Minnesota, MapServer is now maintained by developers around the world.

MapServer runs on all major operating systems and will work with almost any web server. MapServer features MapScript, a powerful scripting environment that supports many popular languages including PHP, Python, Perl, C# and Java. Using MapScript makes it fast and easy to build complex geospatial web applications.

About the Open Source Geospatial Foundation

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation, or OSGeo, is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to support and promote the collaborative development of open geospatial technologies and data. The Foundation provides financial, organizational and legal support to the broader open source geospatial community. It also serves as an independent legal entity to which community members can contribute code, funding and other resources, secure in the knowledge that their contributions will be maintained for public benefit.

OSGeo also serves as an outreach and advocacy organization for the open source geospatial community, and provides a common forum and shared infrastructure for improving cross-project collaboration. The Foundation's projects are all freely available and useable under an OSI-certified open source license.

© Copyright 2007 Open Source Geospatial Foundation, under the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives (by-nd) License.