With the rise in popularity of online mapping sites such as Google Maps, Yahoo maps and Microsoft Live Maps, more and more people are creating maps and spatial ‘mashups'. The only thing holding many people back has been the need to work with the published APIs (Advanced Programming Interfaces) for such platforms, requiring some understanding of programming and HTML. Such platforms have enabled users to create maps showing all kinds of things: locations of photographs from Flickr, places visited, archaeological sites, etc, etc. Pretty much anything with a spatial component to it can be (and, in many cases, has been) mapped in this way; a really good example of the technology with some great archaeological content is the Online Archaeology map, created by Steve White.
Here at Wessex, we are using these technologies to improve access to our geodata within the organisation. We have an installation of PostGIS to store core datasets, such as those provided by English Heritage, and a Geoserver to make these available as Web Mapping Service (WMS) layers. These are published on the intranet using an OpenLayers map which also draws in data from external sources such as Oxford Archaeology (project locations) and Getmapping (OS New Popular Edition). The same layers are also accessible to our desktop GIS applications. Being entirely open source solutions, the main investment in this approach has been the time taken to learn the various components; the learning curve being pretty steep!
This investment in technical skills now allows us to offer specialist services to help clients get the most out of open source web mapping solutions, specialist skills being essential to make the most of the technologies. This is where platforms which allow non-specialist users to get involved are rapidly becoming the next big thing; more on this later.