Related link: http://tinyurl.com/4n6un
The global web mapping site that is launched from the above URL has several general layers of information. When a newsworthy topic comes up, I like to hunt down how much of it I can see on this map. So, when I heard about the storms hampering U.S. Thanksgiving celebrations, I must admit I got somewhat excited. It was a bit of a test. Can I see the storms or zoom into a city and get an idea of the conditions? Pretty much, was my conclusion. The weather patterns were nice and clear on the map (from my nice warm office in western Canada).
The weather-related layers such as radar-based precipitation and storm tracking are usually the most interesting. These are from remote servers and are accessed using Open GIS Consortium standards for web-based mapping services (WMS in particular). The clouds layer is neat too, taken from another source and updated every few hours (thanks to the authors of the upcoming Mapping Hacks book who shared this hack with me).
The software behind the scenes is MapServer (see http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu), coupled with GDAL for robust raster/image data access and GD libraries for some rockin' fast map image creation.
These products are great, not just because they are free, but because they are powerful. The ability to serve up and access so many different formats of data through numerous types of services allows for some pretty interesting projects.
This software and several related tools and web mapping services are part of a book I am currently writing for O'Reilly - due out Summer 2005.
Do you do mapping? Hope to learn more in the future? What would you put on a web map? Share your thoughts, I'd love to hear them.
Read More Entries by Tyler Mitchell.
