Interactive Maps With Polymaps, TileStach, and MongoDB
For the impatient: Checkout Interactive Map of Twitter Weight Loss Goals (very slick)
From Alex Popescu’s myNoSQL:
A three part tutorial on using MongoDB, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, and Javascript libraries for building interactive maps by Hans Kuder:
Visiting part 1 for a larger taste of the project you find:
I’d been toying around with ideas for cool ancillary features for Goalfinch for a while, and finally settled on creating this interactive map of Twitter weight loss goals. I knew what I wanted: a Google-maps-style, draggable, zoomable, slick-looking map, with the ability to combine raster images and style-able vector data. And I didn’t want to use Flash. But as a complete geographic information sciences (GIS) neophyte, I had no idea where to start. Luckily there are some new technologies in this area that greatly simplified this project. I’m going to show you how they all fit together so you can create your own interactive maps for the browser.
Overview
The main components of the weight loss goals map are:
- Client-side Javascript that assembles the map from separate layers (using Polymaps)
- Server-based application that provides the data for each layer (TileStache, MongoDB, PostGIS, Pylons)
- Server-based Python code that runs periodically to search Twitter and update the weight loss goal data
I’ll cover each component separately in upcoming posts, but I’ll start with a high-level description of how the components work together for those of you who are new to web-based interactive maps.
Let your imagination run wild with the interactive maps that you can assemble and populate with topic map based data.