Web Mapping
Web Mapping has become an integral part of our everyday lives. What was the last online map you have used? Was it
- an election map or infographic?
- driving directions?
- an app that lets us report issues with the city?
These have gotten so commonplace that we take them for granted as consumers.
The barrier to entry to create those sort of maps is much, much lower as well. During this workshop, we will introduce you to the basic components needed to build many types of mapping applications. After the introduction, we'll give you an opportunity to practice those skills with your peers.
The field of Geographic Information Systems as it pertains to web mapping is too large to cover in a single workshop. For this workshop, we are going to focus on client side (read: javascript) applications that load data from a fixed file or endpoint. That limits the size of the data set to something that is reasonably consumed all at once. In the Further Explorations section we do some data manipulation (in python) to artificially limit data sets to quantities that fit this approach. This won't work for all use cases, but, with some clever pruning, it can be applied to many situations. The limit will vary for types (points, polygons, etc.) and complexity, but getting several thousand points on a map is certainly feasible
To narrow our work even further, we are focusing on LeafletJS. Leaflet is far from the only tiled (or slippy) web mapping engine, but it is currently the most popular and easiest to use option. It has the added benefit of being permissively licensed open source, which means you can use it freely in both commercial and non-commercial projects.