Welcome to NACIS 2015 in Minneapolis! This is the annual meeting of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS). The theme for this year’s meeting is Mapping Interactions. See the schedule below and go to the NACIS website for more details.
The North American Cartographic Information Society, founded in 1980, is an organization comprised of specialists from private, academic, and government organizations whose common interest lies in facilitating communication in the map information community.
For those of you who were unable to attend the conference, or who couldn’t clone themselves to be at multiple talks at once, many slides are linked in the session descriptions below. Twin Cities local Kitty Hurley also put together this fantastic document summarizing much of what she saw at the meeting, so if slide decks aren’t linked, check out her notes.
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are function libraries that support a system of cloud-based map distribution. Many different mapping APIs have been written for the user-driven web. While the Google Maps API remains by far the most commonly used, a variety of other APIs have been introduced. The ease of mapping with APIs has resulted in all kinds of different maps, many showing information that has never been mapped before.
This workshop examines the variety of mapping APIs and alternatives for data input. Files types to be examined include KML, FusionTables, GeoJSON, and TopoJSON. The workshop will also show how to map data from a MySQL database using a server-side scripting language called PHP. During the 3½ hour workshop, participants will create their own free cloud-based website to implement the examples.
