thoughts on spatial tools and practices
I spent the better part of a decade and a half building geospatial applications in support of infrastructure analysis. Not infrastructure in the modern tech sense of containers and cloud providers and orchestration, but infrastructure in the classic sense of roads and rail and telecommunications. If we consider infrastructure through the lens of the ISO/OSI layered model, I spent a lot of time looking at the physical layer.
One of the most compelling recent success stories for open-source geospatial tools in the Federal Government has been the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) National Broadband Map initiative. It has been a very visible example of the stability, scalability, flexibility, and power of open-source geospatial tools. The Woodrow Wilson Center will be hosting a case study … Read more
See the FCC announcement here.
MapBox has been winning a lot of high-profile converts lately, such as Foursquare. In my opinion, it’s one of the more perfect web mapping solutions, commercial or open-source, to come along in a while. The combination of cartographic engine (Mapnik), tile generation (TileMill) and storage (MBTiles) make MapBox one of the most elegant ways to serve beautiful maps currently available.
Michael Byrne of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) gave a really good talk at FOSS4G, telling the story of the FCC National Broadband Map application, which is built on open-source geospatial tools. In addition to being open-source, it’s a modern web system that makes diligent use of caching and other techniques to achieve great performance. … Read more