Using JavaScript to Create Geospatial and Advanced Maps

Originally published at: http://www.sitepoint.com/javascript-geospatial-advanced-maps/

Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) is an area of cartography and information technology concerned with the storage, manipulation, analysis, and presentation of geographic and spatial data. You are probably most familiar with GIS services that produce dynamic, two-dimensional tile maps which have been prominent on the web since the days of MapQuest.

Until recently, developing geospatial apps beyond a 2D map required a comprehensive GIS service such as ArcGIS, Nokia Here, or Google Maps. While these APIs are powerful, they are also expensive, onerous to learn, and lock the map developer to a single solution. Fortunately, there are now a wealth of useful, open source JavaScript tools for handling advanced cartography and geospatial analysis.

In this article, I’ll examine how to implement GIS techniques with JavaScript and HTML, focusing on lightweight tools for specific tasks. Many of the tools I’ll cover are based on services such as Mapbox, CloudMade, and MapZen, but these are all modular libraries that can be added as packages to Node.js or used for analysis in a web browser.

Note: The CodePen examples embedded in this post are best viewed on CodePen directly.

Geometry & 3D

Distance and Measurement

It is especially useful to have small, focused libraries that perform distance measurement, and conversion operations, such as finding the area of a geo-fence or converting miles to kilometers. The following libraries work with GeoJSON formatted objects representing geographic space.

  • Geolib provides distance (and estimated time) calculations between two latitude-latitude coordinates. A handy feature of Geolib is order by distance, which sorts a list or array by distance. The library also supports elevation.
  • Turf.js, which is described in the next section, also provides a distance function to calculate the great-circle distance between two points. Additionally, Turf.js calculates area, distance along a path, and the midpoint between points.
  • Sylvester is a library for geometry, vector, and matrix math in JavaScript. This library is helpful when basic measurement of lines and planes is not enough.

3D

While the above libraries work well for 2D projections of geography, three-dimensional GIS is an exciting and expansive field—which is natural because we live 3D space. Fortunately, WebGL and the HTML5 canvas have also opened up new 3D techniques for web developers.

Here’s an example of how to display GeoJSON Features on a 3D object:

See the Pen 3D Map Sphere using Three.js by SitePoint (@SitePoint) on CodePen.

You can also check out Byron Houwen’s article on WebGL and JavaScript, which shows how to create a terrain map of earth with Three.js

Continue reading this article on SitePoint

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