Geospatial Technologies for Web Applications and Services

Geospatial Technologies is a term to describe highly-advanced tools to find specific locations on a map. These tools are used in a variety of ways. One of these ways is developing maps of places or things.

Here are some of the most highly used geospatial technologies.

Leaflet

Leaflet is an open-source JavaScript library used to create smart, interactive, and good looking maps. With the Leaflet Library, you can add map layers, zoom controls, and other key map features. This library is easy to use and integrate in any kind of mapping application for the web.

PostGIS

Postgis is a geospatial database extension of PostgreSQL. This technology is can be used to find the geometry, longitude, latitude, distance and other measures. Postgis has some features such as geometric types that are specific to geospatial databases. These measures can be used to location of an object, finding the near objects to a point, and other use cases. More detailed information about some of PostGIS’s geospatial features are explained here.

Mapbox

Mapbox is software used to create maps complete with instant rendering to your web or mobile app. Also, Mapbox has an API that allows developers to reverse geo code coordinates, get routing directions, get distance calculations. Also, when creating a map, there are styles and tiles, and other features that make Mapbox an ideal Map API to use. More information about some of Mapbox’s API is explained here.

GeojSON

GeoJSON is a JSON based format for encoding geospatial data structures especially geometric objects that have additional properties. This format supports Point, LineString, Polygon, Multipoint, MultiLineString and MultiPolygon types.

GDAL

GDAL (Geospatial Data Abstraction Library ) is a Translator library for geospatial formats. GDAL is used to transform one format to another format. A well known GDAL tool to use that transforms files is the ogr2ogr functionality. It is known to transform shapefiles, geojson into a postgres tables and other formats.  Also, Postgis has a tool to load shapefiles to a postgres database called shp2pgsql that is similar but ogr2ogr. However it is believed here that ogr2ogr is the better tool.

Ade Labs applied the use of Postgis, Mapbox, GeoJSON, and GDAL for a National Geographic project here. Also, leaflet has been used for small projects here. Other alternatives for building mapping applications are Google Maps and Mongodb.

Google Maps

Google Maps has APIs that allow for custom maps, routing, searching and much more. Specifically when searching for places you can search for places within a given radius and use other parameters as well. Also, google maps can be used on mobile applications.

MongoDB

MongoDB is a nosql database used for geospatial indexes and queries. Essentially it can act as geospatial database. It is able to handle queries such as spherical and flat surfaces, location data for spherical surface calculations in GeoJSON objects and legacy coordinate pairs, query applications for inclusion, intersection and proximity, geospatial indexing for 2dsphere and 2d and geospatial indexing and sharding.

The geospatial technologies serve as the basis for geospatial based applications and services. Use cases for these applications now are in agriculture, logistics, oil and gas, and much more. In the future, you will notice more geospatial technologies in wearables, cars, and internet of things and what effect they play.

Interested in discussing these geospatial technologies and how they can benefit your project? Leave a comment, contact me here or at adetola@adelabs.com.