Mapping Hacks

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Chapter 8

CHAPTER EIGHT

Building the Geospatial Web

Hacks 87–92

Many of the hacks we’ve looked at create maps of new, previously

unmapped data, such as Wi-Fi usage, your GPS tracklogs, or the news. Most

of these hacks are built on top of other maps that give them context. Usu-

ally they have a step like “Go to http://example.com/data/download to fetch a

certain file.” The web sites with the map data are all over the place, and the

maps are often in different formats. GIS professionals are used to spending a

large amount of time simply finding the data they need to do their actual

work.

The notion of a geospatial web seeks to address this problem. Already we

have seen the shift the Internet has brought toward textual information,

with unheard of quantities of documents a search engine away. The vision

for geospatial information has been referred to as a “digital Earth,” where

you could simply input a point on the globe and have instant access to all

mapping data available at that point—not just what the U.S. census gath-

ered five years ago as TIGER street data, but also the city’s zoning informa-

tion, the current weather map, Rich’s favorite bike routes, Jo’s corrections

on the TIGER street data, public Wi-Fi nodes, and Anselm’s social net-

work. Every map created with the help of this book could be available to

users online, searchable by coordinates and/or information about the map,

and instantly ...