Friendly workflows for creating maps
Tags: Real Estate, Solutions, Product, Data, Travel

By: David Wicks

Maps and location add significant value to companies, driving more user engagement, and better insights.

Companies can differentiate themselves by showing their own data on top of the map, like points of interest, routes, curated itineraries, detailed place info, and more.

But gathering the data can be a pain point, especially for the customers I work with who are creating hundreds (or thousands) of maps for specific groups of users or use cases—travel companies mapping rich interactive itineraries, or real estate companies generating beautiful collateral showing each of their agents’ property listings.

Often, companies have large amounts of their own information, sometimes stored in ad-hoc systems, and they need to create a large number of unique ways to view that information (i.e. lots of maps.)

So we worked with our customers to solve the pain point with a friendly workflow tailored to their needs. We divided that workflow into three major steps: locating, annotating, and publishing.

The three steps are brought together in a single templatized application that makes it easier to produce maps for a specific goal.

Try the workflow for yourself with the Itinerary Builder Demo. Demo source code on github.

Locating the data

The first step, locating the data, is about associating your data with geographic coordinates. Some companies already have longitude and latitude coordinates for all their information, which takes care of this step. For their production pipeline, we simply pulled in location data from their published API. A lot of companies, however, have only a name or address for places of interest. To locate those places, we used Mapbox’s search API and implemented a simple CSV-based workflow, allowing them to use their existing spreadsheets as a starting point for map generation.

Annotating the data

The bulk of production workflow time goes into annotating and authoring the map. In this phase, we choose what data to show on the map and contextualize it. For real estate companies, that context is often a selection of nearby restaurants, parks, and the public library. For travel companies, it usually includes places to stay and highlighted activities from their portfolio. Authoring is accelerated by working with a one-to-one representation of the final output, seeing annotation decisions on the map as they are made.

Publishing the data

Finally, we publish the data. While editing the data, it is kept in an easy-to-edit format, with restricted access for team members. During publishing, the data is converted to an easy-to-read format — either for humans or machines. Sometimes that format is a print-ready graphic. In others, it is a collection of all the relevant data that can be loaded on dynamic, customer-facing maps, stored on multiple edge servers for fast distribution. For most web maps, we choose to store the custom data as JSON, since it allows us to embed the geographic information with useful metadata that helps tell the story of the map.

To get a sense of those ideas in practice, try out the itinerary builder demo. It brings together the ability to locate your data in bulk or one point at a time, annotate the locations with nearby points of interest and your own comments, and publish it to an example user-facing map.

The source code is available here if you’d like to try building your own workflows, or get in touch to discuss your process with our solutions team.