The Design of MapML

DRANK

MapML – What’s the big idea?Geographic mapping applications are central to the numerous aspects of the digital world. They’re in our cars, on our phones, on the web. They’re used by industry, governments, and individuals trying to go about their day.  A huge global industry exists, dedicated to the technology for acquiring, processing, and transforming raw spatial information into formats for use in applications in which maps form part or all of the content.On the Web, the information from which Web maps are made is often, but not always, served by dedicated spatial server software, in the form of raw Web application data, typically encoded as text formats like JSON or XML, and images of various formats.The Web Platform — that is, the set of standards implemented by agreement across browser engines — doesn’t currently include any features that specifically  support mapping applications, such as elements with map-related semantics. Adding to the challenge, Websites that do rely …