OSGeo
We witnessed some interesting presentations this morning about creating open source map mashups.
Brent Owens and Arnulf Benno Christi from OSGeo.org gave an entertaining demo of their Mapbender project. Mapbender is a JavaScript and PHP library for creating free, open source maps. Mapbender combines free map services with specific user requests, allowing users to generate their own maps or take an existing map and “bend” it to suit their needs.
The team also gave an overview of the open services available to anyone who wants to generate their own maps. They walked through the process of simple map creation using the WMS and WFS protocols defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium. Through GetMap and GetFeature requests, users can retrieve vector-based map data, add or delete elements, and then output the results. The maps can be outputted as GIF or JPG for display in a browser, a PDF or SVG for publication, and as KML (Keyhole Markup Language) for insertion into Google Earth.
There’s also a wiki where the open source mapping community hangs out.
