FOSS-for-WebGIS

CUNY Graduate Center Summer 2023: Special Topics in Computational Fundamentals: Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for Web Maps

5:30pm-7:15pm 6/7, 6/14, 6/21, 7/5, 7/12, 7/19, 7/2, 8/2, 8/9, 8/16

Will Field wfield@gc.cuny.edu

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for creating web maps has become ubiquitous and offers numerous advantages over proprietary software. This class will look at open source tools for creating custom web maps with html, css, and javascript. In particular we will focus on MaplibreGLJS, OpenLayers, and Leafletjs. Students will gain a working knowledge of web mapping foundations and survey the current state of the FOSS ecosystem. The final project will be an interactive web map.

An introductory level familiarity with HTML, JS, and CSS is required. Students will also need access to a computer that they can install free software on. Any operating system is ok. To get up to speed, students concerned about prerequisites can follow these tutorials:

HTML/CSS for beginners: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz0aGYrrlhU

JS for beginners: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6NZfCO5SIk

Grading:

50% Homework assignments and final project
50% Class Participation

• Introduction

• Web Mapping Fundamentals

• Mapping Resources

  • Where to get data
  • Where to host data
  • How to edit data
  • Libraries
  • Documentation/Forums
  • Awesome
    • https://github.com/sshuair/awesome-gis
    • https://github.com/mapbox/awesome-vector-tiles
    • https://github.com/osmlab/awesome-openstreetmap

• MapLibre

• d3

• Leaflet

• OpenLayers

• Cesium

• Workshop

• Presentations