We are on the edge of the next big wave of technology, and it has
GIS written all over it. Soon every new cell phone will have GPS (or
some form of location-based services) built in as a standard feature.
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| GIS for Web Developers |
Nearly every major database vendor now includes native geographic
data types. Free sources of geographic data and free applications are
just waiting for you to pull them together and do something clever. You
might create a simple digital version of the pushpin map, or you might
write the next Google Maps killer.
All of our lives we’ve asked “Where am I?” and “How do I get from here
to there?”
You start by rolling over, then crawling, and then walking. You walked
to school or were driven or took the bus. Maybe you eventually drove
yourself. When you got older, you joined a society of people who use
different modes of transportation every day. We ride subways to work.
We take airplane flights to far-off places. We visit client locations. We
attend conferences or night classes. We go shopping. We eat out at
restaurants. Unless you spend your days physically tied to something
large, heavy, and immobile, you probably spend a significant portion of
your time thinking about how to get from here to there and back again.
And how does traditional geography make that easier? It offers you vector and raster data, orthographically rectified and portrayed in the Universal Transverse Mercator projection. (Don’t you feel better already?)
Even asking a simple question like “What is your current latitude and
longitude?” will likely cause most people to back away slowly, hands
up, muttering, “That’s OK—I’ll ask someone else for directions.”
In GIS for Web Developers we’ll talk about GIS in simple terms and demonstrate its real-world uses. We have always been awash in spatial data: houses and buildings have street addresses, customers cluster together in cities and states, you probably store your friends and family in one or more electronic address books. What has been missing up until now are tools targeted at developers without formal training in GIS. What was once a specialized field is now open to new class of technically savvy but untrained map hackers—neogeographers1 . This book is squarely targeted at this new generation of mapmakers. A word of warning to the faint of heart: you will be forced to wade through a quagmire of polysyllabic jargon. My apologies in advance. What you have to look forward to is that by the end of the book you’ll be able to sling these phrases around with confidence, much like saying “instantiate” and “polymorphic” to your fellow software developers. Every application and API presented in this book is free or open source. I have taken great pains to make sure that they are supported on all the major operating systems (Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows). You will have enough on your plate simply battling the obscure lingo and the incompatible file formats. The last things you need to worry about are platform-specific solutions, let alone expensive platform-specific solutions.
In GIS for Web Developers we’ll talk about GIS in simple terms and demonstrate its real-world uses. We have always been awash in spatial data: houses and buildings have street addresses, customers cluster together in cities and states, you probably store your friends and family in one or more electronic address books. What has been missing up until now are tools targeted at developers without formal training in GIS. What was once a specialized field is now open to new class of technically savvy but untrained map hackers—neogeographers1 . This book is squarely targeted at this new generation of mapmakers. A word of warning to the faint of heart: you will be forced to wade through a quagmire of polysyllabic jargon. My apologies in advance. What you have to look forward to is that by the end of the book you’ll be able to sling these phrases around with confidence, much like saying “instantiate” and “polymorphic” to your fellow software developers. Every application and API presented in this book is free or open source. I have taken great pains to make sure that they are supported on all the major operating systems (Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows). You will have enough on your plate simply battling the obscure lingo and the incompatible file formats. The last things you need to worry about are platform-specific solutions, let alone expensive platform-specific solutions.
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