Mapping is a wonderful business, those into GIS really love mucking about with all that data. But there is one thing I know that is universally hated, yes it’s printing or making it at the very least available to others (you know online…..).
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| Look it’s Cumbria! |
Well Mapbiquity is a new kid on the block that aims to get all those shapefiles you have, hosted and displayed online. It takes you through a 3 step process upload, style and maps to create a map and then provides you with some code that you paste into your site to display your map. It uses Google maps as its background which I can imagine in the UK concerning some users when it comes to Terms and Conditions (ah don’t you just love licensing and terms?!).
The process works pretty well I had some trouble placing it on blogger (my blogging platform here), however support was very forth coming and some code was rustled up for me.
I really like the idea of an online mapping solution that fills the gap between free and expensive to host GIS files. However I have some concerns that those who know about shapefiles might want more functionality (or something other than a Google background, for example OpenStreetMap).
I would highly recommend anyone with a few shapefiles hanging around and an urge to put some maps online trying this new service out (the starter package gives you 10MB for free)! It promises to allow you to create some good looking maps.
I wish the Mapbiquity team all the best and look forward to new features and functionality!
Thanks for the post, Elliot!
We hear your concerns and will be working to address them in the coming months. I too had to deal with the Google Terms and Conditions and recognize that they can be quite the hurdle depending on what you need to do. We'll see what we can do about adding more background options including OSM.
Right now we're currently working on enhancing the symbolization options – capabilities to symbolize by category and by value, as well as providing standardized cartographic color palettes such as what @PetersonGIS provides. I'll post more about that in a couple of weeks as we get closer to releasing the functionality at the end of the month.
By the way, I've updated the blog post on how to get a web map on blogger (http://www.mapbiquity.com/blog/post/2011/01/19/Quick-Tip-2-Adding-a-Web-Map-to-a-Blogger-Post.aspx) with the additional issue with margin that we ran into with your test map. We'll update the base code with this soon so you won't have to use this workaround.
Cheers,
Kris Peterson
http://www.mapbiquity.com
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