OpenLayers Webmaps

21 Mar 2018

I recently attended FOSS4G UK 2018 in London. It was a very enjoyable and thought-provoking couple of days with many seminars and workshops about open source geospatial software. Machine learning and data visualisation techniques seemed to be the trending topics at this year’s event. My favourite presentation was probably Ian Turton’s talk on Portable mapping on the Raspberry Pi which I’m looking forward to trying to replicate on my Raspberry Pi.

I also found the workshop on creating web maps with OpenLayers fascinating. So fascinating in fact, that as soon as I arrived home I created my own web map with OpenLayers! I’d been looking for a very quick way of viewing GPS tracks for a while, so I can now email a friend a .gpx file and the GPS Viewer web page address and all they need do is drop the file onto the mapping window. It should be useful for sharing hiking routes and is on an OpenStreetMap base map so covers the whole world!