Web Mapping Illustrated: Using Open Source GIS Toolkits

With the help of the Internet and accompanying tools, creating and publishing online maps has become easier and rich with options. A city guide web site can use maps to show the location of restaurants, museums, and art venues. A business can post a map for reaching its offices. The state government can present a map showing average income by area. Developers who want to publish maps on the web often discover that commercial tools cost too much and hunting down the free tools scattered across Internet can use up too much of your time and resources. Web Mapping Illustrated shows you how to create maps, even interactive maps, with free tools, including MapServer, OpenEV, GDAL/OGR, and PostGIS. It also explains how to find, collect, understand, use, and share mapping data, both over the traditional Web and using OGC-standard services like WFS and WMS. Mapping is a growing field that goes beyond collecting and analyzing GIS data. Web Mapping Illustrated shows how to combine free geographic data, GPS, and data management tools into one resource for your mapping information needs so you don't have to lose your way while searching for it. Remember the fun you had exploring the world with maps? Experience the fun again with Web Mapping Illustrated. This book will take you on a direct route to creating valuable maps.

Tyler Mitchell is the author of Web Mapping Illustrated - a book focused on teaching how to use popular Open Source Geospatial Toolkits. He works as the Executive Director of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, aka OSGeo.

He has over a dozen years of industrial geospatial and GIS experience in natural resource management and forestry in western Canada. He came to open source to find tools that he could use throughout his career as a geospatial professional. What he found were tools that could dramatically improve enterprise, corporate-wide, geospatial data management and communication.

He is an avid proponent of the popular web mapping program, MapServer, and other spatial data management tools including PostGIS, GDAL/OGR and QGIS. His work and interests include geospatial and tabular data management, analysis, manipulation and visualization through maps.