A web-based PostGIS educational tool

PostGIS has become viable platform for storing and managing spatial data and it attracts more and more followers. One of the obstacles for the its uptake, specially in education and training environments, is the presentation of query results. Although for an expert a set of tuples will suffice as a response to a query, many others will be glad to to have a more intuitive and graphical representation of results. To address this need we have developed a web-based tool that produces graphical results in response to spatial queries. The so-called PGclient is a web applications with the look and feel of a desktop application. It uses OpenLayers, GeoExt and Mapserver to provide an intuitive interface to PostGIS. With the PGclient users can interact with spatial data by simply display their tables directly from the browser or they can interact with the database by means of SQL statements. For those queries with geometry outputs the client renders the result graphically. In this presentation will explain the internal architecture of the PGclient, demonstrate its current functionality and discuss potential enhancements.