In short, the biggest revolution that contributed to easy map-making today is that the trouble related to maintaining a map server and the spatial database has been removed. OpenStreetMap is built by a community of volunteer mappers, who contribute to and maintain the spatial data. Google’s database is private and comes with restrictions, while OSM was inspired by the concept of Wikipedia, as a collaborative project to create a free map of the world. Google and the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project datasets changed that. Not many people had access to that data, not to mention its price tag. On the wings of the “Web 2.0” movement, and building off modern technologies like HTML5, CSS3, and SVG, that enable easy creation of interactive content, interactive maps are now living a new renaissance.Īs mentioned before, early online maps were based on sets of GIS data and their spatial geodatabases. Suddenly, online maps become popular to add a nice-looking map to your website, you no longer needed to be a cartographer, or a GIS specialist. This resulted in another new term being coined: “Map mash-ups.” Google also allowed scripting, so users could put Google’s maps on their own websites and add their own data to the map. Because of the ability to “slip” the map around with the smooth zooming and panning functions, these new maps were called “slippy maps”. The result was a bigger visible map that covered more than half of the browser window, and offered a smooth experience for exploring the map. ![]() Zooming and panning now only required loading new map tiles instead of reloading the entire web page. These tiles were rendered and served from a “map tile server,” and are usually 256 x 256 pixels. Their solution was to display a map sliced into many smaller square images called “tiles”. Among its innovations, Google introduced continuous panning by dragging. Google turned the mapping world upside down when it introduced Google Maps in 2005. To get better interaction, early maps required plugins like Flash or propriety plugins based on Java, or even ActiveX, which worked only in Internet Explorer. Because of the constraints of the technology, maps only occupied a very small part of the whole web page. After the user clicked the pan or zoom button, a whole new image would need to be rendered on the map server, loaded over the network, and then processed by the browser. At that time, panning was implemented by moving one step, usually by half of the map size, in one of eight possible compass directions - N, NW, W, SW, S, SE, E, NE. ![]() The first web maps typically showed only a single, very small map image. GIS is full of abbreviations, such as WMS, WFS, EPSG, CRS, SLD, GML, TMS, just to name a few, and to know and understand them, you need to read books, academic papers and articles. It requires understanding geospatial data and map projections, knowledge of how to gather the data, how to display the data, which colors to use, how to generalize the data to specific scales, how to place labels on the map, how to set up a server that will serve the maps, how to use a spatial database, and so on. It requires many server-side technologies, geospatial standards, and protocols, along with their implementations. Eventually, GIS maps started moving from the desktop to the web, and big GIS vendors started making the first frameworks for online maps.īut GIS mapping is not easy. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) were born. Aerial photography, satellite imagery, and remote sensing changed the way spatial data is gathered. ![]() The second half of the 20th century was a turning point for cartography. As technology progressed, cartography and mapmaking processes evolved with it, from manually drawn maps on papyrus to interactive maps on the web. A Little Bit of Historyįrom its beginning, technology has had an influence on mapmaking and how maps are used. I am here to help with this list of the best mapping tools. You want to make maps, but don’t know where to start nor which tools to use. ![]() For web developers not familiar with web mapping, the agony of choice might be intimidating. Making your own online maps is not a big undertaking anymore we have at our disposal a wide range of available online mapping tools, from free and simple, to feature rich and complex to use. Today, using online maps is an easy and engaging process. There’s nothing quite like a good, useful map.
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