Flatmap Server

Flatmap server

The flatmap server is the infrastructure where the generated map tiles are archived and made accessible to a flatmap viewer for display of flatmaps.

The flatmap server’s source code is hosted on Github, which is where issues and feature requests can be raised and flatmap server documentation can be found here.

The flatmap server application includes mapmaker and provides a /make/map endpoint to generate flatmaps described by a source manifest on PMR.

• This process can be started using PMR’s Exposure Creation Wizard (see Publishing a Flatmap as a SPARC Dataset).
• Alternatively it can be started by issuing a HTTP POST request to the make/map endpoint, for instance from a shell prompt:

$ curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST  
       -H "Authorization: Bearer TOKEN"  
       -d '{"source":"’PMR_MANIFEST_URL'"}'  
       MAP_SERVER_URL/make/map

Generated flatmaps are assigned a unique identifier, being the SHA 256 hash of its manifest’s URL. Additionally the full URL of the manifest becomes part of the flatmap’s metadata (its source attribute), and this URL includes the PMR revision of the map.

The map-server provides both MapBox vector tiles and image tiles to the viewer, using industry standard geographical formats, along with flatmap metadata and annotation. Additionally, a local knowledge store, containing cached SCKAN information, can be queried via a SQL endpoint.