THE ANALYSIS OF AVAILABLE GIS SERVERS POSSIBILITIES FOR CREATION OF ELECTRONIC HERBARIUM WEB MAPPING SERVICE (ON THE EXAMPLE OF SCIENTIFIC HERBARIUM OF THE BURYAT STATE UNIVERSITY)
An electronic herbarium published on the Internet allows greater access to the data collected by scientific herbarium for a wide range of users, and also provides remote operation from the her-barium materials. This article analyzes the open source software use to create web mapping service of an electronic herbarium. This article describes the requirements for the functionality of the software for creating web mapping service of electronic herbarium. The article gives a brief description and presents comparative characteristics of free web mapping servers MapServer, GeoServer, GeoMixer, QGIS Server, describes their advantages and disadvantages. The adaptation and conversion of an existing electronic database of Herbarium of the Buryat state University from excel format to vector format has been realized. Comparative analysis has shown that all four web mapping servers (MapServer, GeoServer, GeoMixer, QGIS Server) have sufficient functionality to create on their basis a web mapping service of electronic herbarium, but with some restrictions on certain parameters. A test version of web mapping service of electronic herbarium of the Buryat State University has been created based on UMN MapServer in conjunction with P.mapper. At the moment, the web mapping service includes the following layers: wms-layer of basic map, vector layer reflecting the place of collection of herbarium specimens and their characteristics, vector layer of districts' boundaries of the Republic of Buryatia.