Demonstration Earth map created using OpenLayers 3 beta with zoom, brightness, contrast, hue and saturation controls
This Earth map can be dragged and zoomed and its appearance can be customized with the controls — Go ahead and try it out!
The Past
As has been the case for centuries, one of the most effective tools for communicating geographic information
is a beautiful and informative map.
Over the last several decades, cartographic publishing has been moving from the printing press to the Internet.
In order to learn the art and science of web mapping, I have had to climb many mountains,
not knowing in advance which of them would lead to an optimal set of elements from which I
could compose the framework for our biodiversity data sharing and mapping site.
Open source software technologies and examples that I have explored for creating our software system include:
GIS programs — Quantum GIS, uDig
Web programming — HTML, CSS, JavaScript
Key programming languages — Objective-C, Python, Java, R
Raster data formats — NetCDF, HDF5
Database management systems — PostGIS, PostgreSQL, SciDB, rasdaman, SpatiaLite
Database GUIs — pgAdmin3
Map servers — GeoServer, MapServer
Client-side web mapping frameworks — OpenLayers, Heron, TileMill
Mobile (iOS) application development tools — Xcode
Code development editors — Komodo, KompoZer, BlueGriffon, Coda, Aptana Studio
Content management systems and frameworks — Django, Drupal, Joomla
The Present
I now have enough knowledge to articulate a viable vision for crafting the underlying technology
for our Global Biodiversity Visualization Project.
I crafted this website almost entirely using hand-coding in order to:
Learn the essential software technologies
Create a design and a framework for the project website
Demonstrate a state-of-the-art geographic visualization
Developing this site by hand required learning website and web mapping programming.
I chose this route as a better investment of time than pre-packaged solutions or even drag-and-drop editing
in order to create a more precise and custom product and for the long-term integral of productivity.
This required a great deal of initial start-up time investment, but, unlike alternative approaches,
will result in a smoothly accelerating developmental growth curve.
The Future
Now that a design outline and the foundational website code are both in place, I can start balancing my time
between software infrastructure development and actually doing collaborative science.
The science will also involve some significant start-up time investments in order
to design and code the necessary algorithms.
The next steps for creating our website, visualization, and data-handling software systems include:
Create a data pipeline connecting Excel spreadsheets to a database such as PostGIS
Set up a server that can publish gridded data from NetCDF files and site data from the database
Connect both sets of data to our web mapping system
Create a database for the biodiversity community to support logging into the website and uploading data
Launch the website
Write an iOS app for mobile data entry, editing, and viewing