I want to create an application where users can mark on map location of polluting factories. Google map provides a MAP editor feature. We would like to have our own website like www.toxic-map.org where people could mark these locations. What would be the best approach for this?
Additionally we should be able to backup this database which could be cross checked or used for other purposes.
This will enable us to have little accurate census of such entities and thereby helping us in the fight against these environment harming, illegal factories. Most of our work is focused on developing countries of Asia.
Edited: Google maps is one of the options. I am open to other possible solutions as well. I am looking at something we could do quick prototyping in.
Thank you in advance!!
On the client side, I recommend you to have a look at OpenLayers, a free and open source web mapping framework released under a BSD-style License. It is completely written in Javascript and offers a lot of functionality, including the features that your application may need (Add markers to the map, drag them to adjust the locations, ...).
It also supports dozens of different geographic data formats and services such as WMS, KML or Google Maps.
If you are worried about licensing issues regarding the use of Google Maps, you can use other global data sources like OpenStreetMap or a public WMS if they provide enough coverage of your area of interest.
On the server side, I agree with the answer provided by Daniel Vassallo. I will just add a little detail and recommend you to serve the markers in a standard format natively supported by OpenLayers like KML, GeoJSON or GeoRSS. It will make really easy to draw the markers on the map.
Looks like a really interesting project, I hope you are lucky starting it up.
I seem to remember that there are restrictions to what you can do with the coordinates if you enter them through Google's interface, but if that doesn't bother you then sure, Google might be the way to go. (It may just pertain to geometrical figures entered into Google Earth or something like that.)
Google seems to be in line with your ideology anyway, as they're doing a lot of green power development. Might even be a selling point.
But if you can input the data separately and have Google Maps just display it for you then I wouldn't think they could hold claim to the data.
I think your best bet is to use the Google Maps API instead of the map editor in My Maps.
With some basic JavaScript, you will be able to allow users to drop markers on the polluted locations they would want to tag.
You will need a database on the server-side, and a thin application layer that:
Accepts and validates new markers added by users.
Serves the markers from the database to the browser.
You may want to use AJAX to interact between the browser and the application layer.
I think this type of project would be an excellent candidate to be hosted on the Google App Engine. You will be able to leverage on the simplicity of the webapp framework, and the Google Datastore appears to fit well.
As a side-note, you might be interested in checking out the Heat Map API for Google Maps. I think heat maps would look good in a project like this.
The approach is this:
1. User can drag the marker to the location of toxic factory.
2. A simple form opens to enter details of the toxic factory.
3. The latitude, logitude and other datails are then saved in database.
Please refer www.loppee.com They have a similar solution where user can mark the location of people or places of interest. Loppee uses LeafletJS javascript framework. It is a simple framework. You would be able to develop quick prototype. LeafletJS.com has simple and easy to use code samples.
Additionally, you can enable Geolocation and IP triangulation. Refer: Longitude and latitude value from IP address
Related
I want to make a very clean map that only shows relevant information - e.g., only the streets that matter. I was going to just draw a map while looking at Google's, but that turned out to be very slow. Is there any way to make this easier, perhaps with some combination of mapping software and Google's API?
(If I should of put this on another SE site, please tell me)
Building upon Suvi's nice answer.
There is a very useful open-source project that collects street data for the entire globe. It's called OpenStreetMap. On their website you can extract the specific street data you need. It only takes a few clicks and bam! you got the map you need. Their data can also be accessed (perphaps easier for some) from here and here. Those links can provide you with the shapefile(map) that you need. Your newly aquired map can then be loaded in the free QGIS software that was mentioned. There you can easily select the streets you are interested in.
When you mean you want to only show "streets that matter", you are out of luck with using Google Maps. Because you have no control over the ROADMAP data that google provides. Now what you can do, is use another mapping software such as ArcGIS or Quantum GIS (which is free). Both these softwares allow you to load road data shapefiles, and you can query (select) which roads you want to display and customize the look of it to your liking.
If you want a quick approach (without having to download softwares), I believe ArcGIS has an online portal which allows you to display information you want on top of their base maps. You will still need the shapefile for your streets though. Check this link out, make yourself an account and experiment around with it http://www.arcgis.com/home/. If you click on the Map tab, it takes you to a screen which should allow you to upload shapefiles.
You said you were ' going to just draw a map'. If all you need is a very clean map, you can consider using iMap Builder which is a mapping software supports both map shape files, and custom Google maps. I have used to create some simple map projects before and worked great for me. You can use their pre-made map templates which shows just the map outlines without any details, you can then add routes / points / mouse-over speech bubbles etc as you need.
I just handed new GIS project and given two choices for map solution.
http://mapstraction.com
http://openlayers.org
Now i know only google maps and dont have any idea about the above two.
My goal is to provide price effective solution (thats main) having good performance and doing basic task on map like display points, draw region (polygons), create markers.
I also had to do geocoding and reverse geo coding but from my search i dont think its possible with the above two, but i can get third party vendor here to do it.
Guys i need your feedback here badly.
Thank you
Mapstraction isn't a library in it's own right, it's an abstraction layer that allows you to write your map code once and then swap from say OpenLayers to Google Maps (or about 12 other providers) by changing one line of JavaScript code.
Mapstraction also provides a geocoding abstraction currently supports seven geocoding providers including Google and OpenLayers.
Check out the Mapstraction wiki for more details.
Alternatively you can use OpenLayers directly for mapping and geocoding via OpenStreetMap.
In my web application I have a list of businesses/clients and their information, including their address. I'd like to mark one of them, then get the other businesses/clients that are in a X km radius.
I'd prefer to control the X with a slider, and I'd prefer to display the results on a map as well, but neither point is crucial. How should I go about this? Would Google Maps be a good tool? Where can I find more information, or an example of this?
Google Maps API should work well for this.
In fact combine it with Fusion tables, is even better. FT will host your database, and make making 'spatial' queries against your data easy (ie results within X of Y). FT is even intergrated with the Maps API to display the results of your query direct on the map.
If you want to use an Open Source Javascript library with possibly a bit more flexibility than google maps' API, use OpenLayers - and if you dont want to have to pay the new Google Maps API fees, you can use OpenStreetMap for your background layers. Make your slider with something like jQuery UI or Dojo and link them with some event handling. Job done.
What's your back end application written in? There's assorted geospatial libraries that make spatial queries nice n easy in most languages. A bit of googling should bring them up. I doubt you'll need to go for a full spatial database, but if you do then check out PostGIS - that can do stuff like find all the businesses within Xkm of a major road (once you've got all the data into it of course!).
www.osgeo.org is the best start for open source geospatial software. Lots of web, database, and desktop tools there.
Google Maps doesn't support a local search. It provide only an API to find and set marker and get a direction. It has some beautiful maps, too. What you want is the harvesine formula to look for close targets. Alernatively you can use a spatial extension and search for tiles or cluster of targets. It's just an approximation. I don't thin that FT support the former or the latter. It's just a Sqlite-alike database to store your markers.
Try mysql spatial extensions.If you cannot implement Radius Query which i think you cannot consider strongly to switch to postgresql+postgis.Once you migrate this problem will be solved in 5 minutes.
Also for a custom solution take a look at this answer
Cheers
I manage the development of some academic web mapping software for authoring collections of geographic data. It's a fairly simple interface for creating historic maps. The project is based on Google Maps v.2, and because v.2 is going to be discontinued in 2013, we thought we'd bite the bullet early and upgrade to v.3.
It turns out that's a big job that requires completely rethinking how the map part of our application works. We have to rewrite all our custom Gmap controls, restructure several parts of the application, and a few other big changes--for example, v.3 doesn't integrate with Google Earth as well as v.2, and we use Google Earth a lot. Because of this, and because we're starting to use more features that Gmap doesn't support natively (like WMS maps), I've been wondering if it might be worth switching from Gmap to OpenLayers. From what I understand, OpenLayers has all the features of Google Maps, has native support for WMS and supports many more data formats, lets us use all the Google imagery anyway, and works with KML.
My question to the community is for people who know OpenLayers and Google Maps: can you give me an idea of how the workload for upgrading from Gmap v.2 to v.3 compares to a complete port from Gmap v.2 to OpenLayers? And what other downsides should we be aware of?
One of our biggest concerns: we use Google Earth a lot. If we went to OpenLayers, we'd have to synchronize Earth and OpenLayers ourselves, but it sounds like that's what we'd have to do in Gmap v.3 as well. From what I've read, OpenLayers doesn't have native support for Google Earth or any kind of 3D geobrowser, but there are some projects (like this) that try to bridge the gap. How much of a headache would this be?
Very interesting question!
Upgrade to newer version of Google Maps should be less time consuming because you already have working code and even though you make will have to make big changes you should be able to reuse some parts of the codebase. That's only my guess, because it's hard to be more precise without seeing the code :)
You should still take a look at OpenLayers. You mentioned that you already need WMS support and probably there are more features out there that OpenLayers supports and Google Maps doesn't. OpenLayers supports a wide variety of datasources, is open and follows OGC standards. It has support for Google Maps, and if you one day decide to change to Bing, Yahoo or your own maps you will only need to make minor changes to your code.
I was in the same situation. I took a look at openlayers and started implementing some of the functionality in openlayers. I was able to replace SOOOOO much google maps api code with just a few lines in openlayers. So i kept going, in no time i had re-developed in openlayers and cut down the javascript required to do so by more than half! I am also able to do much more! exporting, importing from all sorts of formats is now just lines of code rather than man lines. OpenLayers all the way!
I'm currently working on a project which maps items to a physical location within a building. We have a map created in our GIS system (ArcGIS), and are able to resolve items to the appropriate shape ID on this map.
We want to create a web map using one of the APIs such as Google maps or Open Layers in order to display this info, directing the user to the correct location on the map, and ideally highlighting the particular location (for example using a shaded polygon), or at least identifying it with some sort of marker.
However we're very new to all of the online mapping APIs, and are finding it pretty overwhelming at the moment. All we really want is a flat map with our own custom imagery - we dont really care about geo-referencing, or projections etc.
Does anyone have any tips or info about how we might go about this? Even just general pointers would be helpful - it's hard to know where to look when there's so much info out there!
Cheers
If you are using ArcGIS Server, use ArcCatalog to expose your data as a WMS.
If you do not have an ArcGIS Server license, you can use MapServer or GeoServer to do the same (i.e expose as a WMS).
OpenLayers has support for adding WMS layers. See their examples section for sample code.
Cheers
OpenLayers can handle your own custom imagery maps without any problems.
You can check out this example:
http://openlayers.org/dev/examples/image-layer.html
And of course you need to read the API documentation
If you are using ArcGIS to creat eyour map, then use ArcGIS Server to serve up the maps online. Then use ArcGIS JavaScript API to build your web application. There are several out-of-the-box templates as well as easy-to-use examples for performing basic actions such as pan, zoom, select, highlight, redlining, etc.
Create your map service, then add your custom Map as a Dynamic Map Service or a Tiled Map Service (if you've cached it). Perform a Find (or Query if you have more than one feature you want to highlight). Add the Graphic from the FindResult to your GraphicsLayer.
Here's a more complete example.
You could also look at MapGuide OS and (if you don't have studio) Maestro. It is a server side application that will take in SHP files from Arc easily. The only downside IMO is that the built in search and reporting functionality is rather limited but can be extended via the API (C#, PHP and Java) that and it is rather centralized with a persistent process on the server (which can make debugging exceedingly fun).
The fusion/flexible (or whatever they heck they call it) layouts are based on the OpenLayers API but is still relatively new. And you can publish as a WMS or WFS I believe (I haven't done it personally).
If using ArcGIS Server, you can also expose your imagery and feature layers via a REST endpoint that can be consumed by OpenLayers. Check out James Fee's blog post on the topic.