Open mapping with UW's Cartography Lab

Brad Leege
Fri, 02 Sep 2016 00:00:00 -0400

This week, Sam, Molly, Angelina, and I represented Mapbox at the University of Wisconsin’s Cartography Lab Education Series Workshop in Madison. The series provides a regular forum for students, educators, researchers, and professionals in the community to connect, as well as share knowledge about working with mapping and GIS tools.

The topics focused on open source mapping technologies and how to use them to build different types of mapping applications for web and mobile. We also dove into the technical differences between raster and vector tiles, and discussed why the industry is moving towards vector. Finally, we were joined by UW’s own Carl Sack and John Czaplewski, who presented on using Turf.js and PostGIS in mapping applications.

Molly explaining how to make vector maps with Mapbox GL JS.

We’re thrilled to have been invited to be a part of the workshop and love connecting with students early in their careers. It was great seeing how undergrads and grads use our tools, and gave us a chance to learn about some neat mapping projects and techniques. The Cartography Lab and UW Geography Department continue to do an excellent job preparing students for a future of mapping and we are excited to support them along the way.

A big thank you to Tanya Buckingham and Robert Roth for organizing this workshop. Reach out on Twitter to talk open source or learn more about the Madison mapping community!