The advancements in utilising maps has come a long way. We once solely relied on physical paper maps for directions and now have evolved to relying on digital maps. This mapping improvement has definitely made it easier to locate various places. There’s a variety of digital maps that are impeccably designed to provide easy and convenient data.
Google is by far the leader of web mapping applications and below are some of the other widely used digital maps.
Google Maps
Google Maps is a web mapping application that’s offered by Google. Google Maps is the leading web mapping application in the world and is used by over 1 billion people all over the world. Google maps has numerous functions. It can be used as a route planner, which allows users to find available directions through either driving, using public transportation, biking or walking. It can offer traffic data, provide street views of 360° panoramic street-level views, and 45° angles of aerial imagery that provide a bird’s eye view of locations.
Bing Maps
Bing Maps is a web mapping application that’s offered by Microsoft’s Bing suite of the search engines. Bing Maps was initially launched as MSN Virtual Earth on the 24th July 2005, but this original mapping application lacked many distinguishing features. Some Bing Map features include street maps where users can easily browse topographically shaded street maps from numerous cities around the world. The road view is the default map view and displays to users’ vector imagery of buildings, roads and geography. Aerial views and bird’s eye view display aerial imagery from aircrafts flying low. Venue maps allows users to see the layout of venues and 3D maps allows users to view environments in 3D.
OpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap is a collaborative web mapping application that provides free and editable geographic databases. This digital map was created by a UK based man by the name of Steve Coast in 2004. What inspired him to create OpenStreetMap was the success of Wikipedia and the propriety map data found in the UK and other areas. Users may be able to collect data by using manual surveys, aerial photography, GPS devices, their own knowledge or other free sources. The crowdsourced data is made available under the Open Database License for everyone to utilise, so this app is as rewarding as playing at ZAR Casino online.
Carto
Carto was formally known as CartoDB and is a software as a service (SaaS), cloud computing platform that provides web mapping, GIS and spatial data science tools. The company has positioned itself as a Location Intelligence platform as some of its tools, with an aptitude for data analysis and visualisation, don’t require prior GIS or development experience. Carto’s Map API serves as a dynamic tiles service which creates new files based on client’s request. The users can design maps in the web application and use those data and styles in custom designed web applications. Carto offers a wide variety of datasets from all over the world that’s accessible through its Data Observatory which acts as the company’s special data source. Data scientists are able to augment their data and widen their analysis with the location data that’s available in the Data Observatory.