How can I add an interactive map to my web site?

Overview

Mapping involves a lot of concepts that are hard to put together by yourself. This page provides a survey of the different opensource tools available to do this work.

Options

For serving maps: mapserver[0], geoserver[1], suas mapserver[2], openstreetmap[3], mapnik[4] This means that these programs can read mapping data files and create maps from them.

Data

​Census folks have recently released updated data.

​National atlas is another gov site. This one has great categories: transportation, water, people, history, etc.

Geo coding

​http://geocoder.us/ - Geocoding site that lets you look up one address at a time. Their sourcecode is available, if one was interested in offering this service.

​http://www.batchgeocode.com/ Geocode multiple addresses on one site. Uses the Yahoo geocoding API[9]

RSS

​GeoRSS is simple proposal for RSS feeds to also be described by location[10]

Building the maps

The front end

For presenting maps: ka-map[5], openlayers[6], worldkit[7], geomoose[8] This is software for creating layers of data, zooming in or out of a map, etc.

Putting it all together

Mapserver seems to be the best choice for serving maps. It's been around the longest and can do it all. Geoserver uses Tomcat, which is why I did not use it. SUAS I was not able to get installed. I was very intrigued but could not find some key components as I was trying to install. Openstreetmap is an opensource project to map the world. Mapnik is the latest and greatest software. It makes very pretty maps!

Ka-boom seemed to be the best choice for a front end, mainly because it has a tiling mechanism that allows for smooth scrolling inside a map. I ended up choosing openlayers because it allowed me to plot points on a map using GeoRSS feeds.

[0]​http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/

[1]​http://geoserver.org/

[2]​http://www.easywms.com/easywms/?q=en/suas

[3]​http://www.openstreetmap.org/

[4]​http://mapnik.org

[5]​http://ka-map.maptools.org/

[6]​http://www.openlayers.org/

[7]​http://worldkit.org/

[8]​http://www.geomoose.org/moose/

[9]​http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/rest/V1/geocode.html

[10]​http://www.georss.org/overview.html