Last week at Web Directions North 08 I caught Eric Rodenbeck of Stamen Design's presentation on Information Visualization as a Medium, it was a great presentation. One of the projects he talked about the Oakland Crime Spotting which plots crime locations and times on a map.

People in the audience were curious what tools they used for their various visualization projects. Largely the display is done in Flash, but what's under the hood? For this particular mapping application was built with Modest Maps

Modest Maps is a BSD-licensed display and interaction library for tile-based maps in Flash (ActionScript 2.0 and ActionScript 3.0) and Python.

Our intent is to provide a minimal, extensible, customizable, and free display library for discriminating designers and developers who want to use interactive maps in their own projects. Modest Maps provides a core set of features in a tight, clean package, with plenty of hooks for additional functionality.

Some of the reasons you might want to use this library is it can pull map tiles from multiple services such as Google Maps, Microsoft, OpenStreetMap and others, AS2 works on FlashLite (for mobile) yet it's still fairly light weight. Stamen helps work on Modest Maps.

If you look carefully at this map you'll notice that the UI is in Flash but it's pulling mapping tiles from Microsoft Virtual Earth, ha;-)

I then decided to look into Ajax alternatives, since Google Maps is the poster child of Ajax apps. I found a couple interesting projects which I've listed below.

OpenLayers

Click here to view the live demo.



OpenLayers is a similar library for JavaScript developers built with Prototype and Rico provides you with tools you need to create a Google Maps like interface, but it's completely free and open source:

OpenLayers makes it easy to put a dynamic map in any web page. It can display map tiles and markers loaded from any source. MetaCarta developed the initial version of OpenLayers and gave it to the public to further the use of geographic information of all kinds. OpenLayers is completely free, Open Source JavaScript, released under the BSD License.

Mapstraction

Click here for the live demo.



Mapstraction focuses on isolating your map application from the mapping provide. They provide support for 9 major mapping providers as well as drawing support with point, line and polygons, GeoRSS and KML feed import just to name a few features. From the site:

Mapstraction is a library that provides a common API for various javascript mapping APIs to enable switching from one to another as smoothly as possible. Developers can code their applications once, and then easily switch mapping provider based on project needs, terms and conditions, and new functionality.

I like the way Mapstraction maintains the original providers UI, but feeds it your data, companies like Google , Yahoo and Microsoft all do a really good job with UI and I'm not sure it's worth trying to recreate it yourself unless your use case is really unique.

If you know of any others please let me know:)

Read more from Andre Charland.