Give Your Applications Mapping Capabilities, Part 1

ome of the most interesting features of modern web sites are based on Geographical Information System (GIS) technologies. GIS techniques essentially give you a way to manage and show geographical data in your systems. For example, a manufacturing company can display a map showing every building it occupies, every office in a building, or the location of every sale it makes—worldwide—or a cab company can use GIS data to track the position of its cabs nearly in real time.

Not too long ago, the expense and rarity of the maps themselves hindered the use of GIS data in applications, but today, full-featured maps are available through Google Maps, Google Earth, and Microsoft Virtual Earth (among others) that you can use to display your GIS data in web applications. The advent of such mapping systems is one of the most exciting technologies to emerge in the last few years—and they're still undergoing constant and rapid evolution. Today, you can easily collect geographical data, analyze and filter that data, and merge it with a mapping provider to create maps that display the data to your users. This article gives you a launch point by exploring what GIS data is, how to collect it, and how to manage it.