Part 8: SDI-in-a-Box: Web Mapping Frameworks What’s exciting about all of the web mapping technology bits discussed in previous sections is that they can all be molded and combined in various ways to do new and interesting things with maps. Everything is customizable, and together they can provide a powerful range of functionality for creating…
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Part 7: Serving Your Map Harkening back to Part 1, recall that the map image you see on your computer screen when you go to Google or MapQuest has to be served, i.e. sent from a database or memory cache to the client’s browser. This is the job of the web (or HTTP) server, a piece of…
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Part 6: Making Your Own Tiles The bulk of web mapping for public consumption these days is done through, or at least on top of, tile services. A lot of government data still comes in untiled form, but this data is either rendered as it is served or cached (stored for quick access) by the…
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Part 5: Storing GIS Data for the Web You: Hey! What happened to Part 4??? Me: Well, this series is a work in progress, and sometimes progress is uneven. My original idea was for a trilogy of “web mapping for beginners” overview documents. But like Douglas Adams, once I start something, I find I can’t…
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Part 3: Public Tile Services Nowadays there are really two options for making an interactive web map: use somebody’s pre-fab tiles, or make and serve your own. Self-publishing used to be tricky business, but improving tile-rendering software and hosting services are making it easier. This process will be addressed in Section 5. Most mash-ups are…
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Part 2: Tile Maps and APIs Say you’re playing around on Google Maps. You click and hold your mouse button to magically drag the map around from Timbuktu to Connecticut. Then you zoom in on Schenectady until you can see your cousin’s car parked in his driveway and his kid playing with his dog in…
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Part 1: What is a WMS? A Web Map Service (WMS) is an OGC (Open Geospatial Consortium) specification that “defines a common interface for disseminating digital maps, rendered from spatial data, across the Internet. WMS supports the networked interchange of web based map layers, which are generally rendered in a digital image such as JPEG,…
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Part 4: Open JavaScript Libraries For many of the tile services listed in Part 3, the purveyors of the tiles provide their own fully functional API that allows you to build on their map and make it available to clients. However, some of them—like MapBox, Stamen, and OpenStreetMap—just provide you with the basemap (and in…
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