Location services is one of the most interesting areas of web development today. Technologies that were once too complex and esoteric to be used by anyone outside of NASA or the military became standard offerings for the likes of Hotels.com and Foursquare, and are now being regularly deployed by even the smallest startups. In this presentation I track the evolution of mobile mapping and talk about the rich capabilities around location now available to even casual mobile developers around mapping, demographics and location-aware customer insights.

1. The Evolution of Mobile Mapping
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2. IBM
My timeline
• 1991: left college, shunned Finance, stumbled into a GIS job
• 1994: came to MIT, discovered the web soon after
• 1997: started a company doing web-mapping-as-a-service
• 2004: finished PhD on geospatial web services
• 2005-2014: worked in geospatial web standards
• 2014-: Cloudant/IBM Geo with NoSQL/JSON
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Evolution of Web Mapping
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TDMA, GSM 1997: GPRS
(1st data network)
2000s: CDMA 2000, EDGE, 3G 2010+: 4G, LTE
Mobile data speeds
70s-90s
pen plotters
1989
GPS
WWWeb
2010+
Client-Side Everything
JSON, Data, GIS
1993
Xerox PARC
Map Viewer
2005
Google Maps, AJAX
2000
End of
Selective GPS
Late 1990s
“GIS”
Web Maps
1996
MapQuest
Late 1990s
“Map Servers”

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What have we learned?
• Speed matters
• Pre-compute data that doesn’t change
into image TILES
• Use a specialized server,
not a GIS bolt-on
• Design & UIX matter
• AJAX
• Responsive design
• Web standards
• Location is a supporting actor
• the app is more important than the map
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Where are we today?
• Components of a great mobile mapping app
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Basemap tiles
•Google, Bing
•OpenStreetMap
•Mapbox
Web Clients
•Leaflet, OpenLayers
•Google, Esri, Bing
Custom data
•Cloudant, Esri
•PouchDB
Query APIs
•OGC standards
•Cloudant, Google, etc.
HTML5 /
Javascript

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Where are we today?
• Components of a great mobile mapping app
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Basemap tiles: Mapbox
API Query: all restaurants X meters from Y that serve Z
Web client: LeafletJS
Custom data: restaurants

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Code!
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Where are we headed?
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Cartography with CSS and SVG
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10. IBM
Clients everywhere
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Turf: GIS everywhere
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Thanks
Questions?
Raj Singh
IBM Cloudant Developer Advocate
rrsingh@us.ibm.com
twitter: @rajrsingh
http://www.linkedin.com/in/rajrsingh
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References
• Cloudant: http://www.cloudant.com
• GeoJSON: http://geojson.org
• Leaflet: http://leafletjs.com
• OpenLayers: http://openlayers.org
• Mapbox: http://mapbox.com
• Mapserver: http://mapserver.org
• Geoserver: http://geoserver.org
• Esri: http://www.esri.com
• Turf: http://turfjs.org
• A Brief History of Web Mapping:
http://www.slideshare.net/stevenfeldman/history-of-web-mapping
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2015