Geoserver Japan

This page covers the use of Geoserver to import GIS information about historical feudal Japan, in particular 1664 boundaries among daimyos. This data is available on Harvard's website: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis/japan/archive/

Prep for Geoserver

Copy Data

First, copy the data to the Tomcat server where Geoserver is running:

sudo cp -r jp_toku_dmyo_pgn /var/lib/tomcat7/webapps/geoserver/data/data/feudaljapan1
sudo chown -R tomcat7:tomcat7 /var/lib/tomcat7/webapp/geoserver/data/data/feudaljapan1

Geoserver

Make Workspace

Geoserver > Data > Workspaces

Create new workspace

(I was having problems with this so I just reused another workspace)

Make Data Store

add new store, point to the directory where the shapefiles were copied (on the tomcat server).

This should then prompt you to publish a layer associated with that data store.

Making a Layer

To turn the Shapefile into a layer, you must specify projection information. Unfortunately, Geoserver is not very good at this. Fortunately, you can use http://prj2epsg.org/ for a much more robust search of EPSG codes. I found the one I was looking for, that matched the data set about Feudal Japan:

Once I picked 4008 as my EPSG code, I was able to make the layer without any problems.

Leaflet

The final step was to use this new layer in a Leaflet map.