Book Image

OpenLayers 3: Beginner's Guide

By : Thomas Gratier, Paul Spencer, Erik Hazzard
Book Image

OpenLayers 3: Beginner's Guide

By: Thomas Gratier, Paul Spencer, Erik Hazzard

Overview of this book

<p>This book is a practical, hands-on guide that provides you with all the information you need to get started with mapping using the OpenLayers 3 library.</p> <p>The book starts off by showing you how to create a simple map. Through the course of the book, we will review each component needed to make a map in OpenLayers 3, and you will end up with a full-fledged web map application. You will learn the key role of each OpenLayers 3 component in making a map, and important mapping principles such as projections and layers. You will create your own data files and connect to backend servers for mapping. A key part of this book will also be dedicated to building a mapping application for mobile devices and its specific components.</p>
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
OpenLayers 3 Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Using geospatial data from Flickr


Because OpenLayers is so flexible, it's easy to make third-party software and data work with our maps. Sharing geospatial data is becoming more popular, with services such as Flickr and Twitter freely offering geospatially embedded data. Being able to visualize data often helps us to understand it. Using OpenLayers, we can place geospatial data (say, Twitter posts or Flickr images) on a map and get a clearer picture about the data.

Note on APIs

Many popular sites provide an API (Application Programmer Interface) that allows programmers to interact with their data. For instance, both Flickr and Twitter provide APIs that enable developers to view recent updates (photo uploads and tweets). These APIs (but not all APIs) let us get geospatial data that we can use with OpenLayers. Flickr provides some very easy-to-use methods to retrieve data with associated geographic information; so, we'll focus this chapter on building a web-mapping application around Flickr...