Online GIS - Meet The Cloud Publication Platforms That Will Revolutionize Our Industry
Channel: Andrea Ross
Date: 26/09/2013

Web mapping has become very exciting in the last year or two. Many new products have come onto the market that make the creation and publication of web maps easier by an order of magnitude. The demand for quick and easy web maps isn't a new one, so why is it only now that we're seeing products that address this need enter the market? The answer is twofold: first, cloud computing has has hugely reduced the cost of running resource hungry map servers; and, second, the open source building blocks that most of the products featured in this presentation utilise have reached the level of maturity required to build reliable, scalable products on top of them. Most of this new generation of cloud based web map publication products are indeed "standing on the shoulders of giants" and wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the tremendous work done by the open source GIS community over the last decade. This presentation will be a follow up to my free ebook released in March entitled "Online GIS - Meet the Cloud Publication Platforms that Will Revolutionize our Industry" (www.onlinegis.com), the presentation will take a closer look at the products covered in the book and particular the open source building blocks that make them possible. You no doubt are wondering is why the CEO of a web map software company would want to give a presentation that not only looks at his product but also those of his "rivals". The short answer is that I get asked all the time what the difference is between these products and also see the same question asked many times in online forums and social media channels, so it's obviously something that needs answering. I also don't view most of these products as our rivals, although all of the products featured in this presentation are capable of similar end results; the steps required to achieve those results differ hugely, with each aiming to make that process as smooth as possible for a certain type of user, be it programmer, casual GIS user or GIS analyst. After this presentation you'll have a good idea of the differences between ArcGIS Online, CartoDB, GeoCommons, GISCloud, MangoMap and Mapbox, you will also have a clearer idea of which of the products is best suited to your unique needs and requirements as well as the open source building blocks that power them. This presentation isn't going to show you how to use these products, but it will show you what is possible with each of them and what it takes in order to achieve the best results.