Smallworld Welcome To 2013

I recently saw a tweet welcoming Smallworld-using utilities to 2007...

Welcome to 2007, utilities. Google, GE Join Forces in Energy Sector Mapping Tool energy.aol.com/2013/02/27/goo…
— Helen Fairman (@helen_fairman) February 28, 2013

... while it may be true that the GE/Google announcement brings back memories of 2007, it is also true that Smallworld users have had the option of accessing web maps since at least 2009. You can see many examples of that here and here.

The web mapping world has changed a lot since 2007.  In my opinion, one of the cooler web mapping options involves MapBox.  I have blogged about them here.  MapBox provides a way for users to quickly create beautiful maps and host them on MapBox infrastructure.  You have access to pre-packaged Terrain, Satellite and Road layers that you can then customize to your style and visibility requirements.  In addition, you can create your own map layers and upload them to MapBox.

The following video clip demonstrates Smallworld access to MapBox maps with a specific example around styling your own contour lines and hillshading to integrate with your asset data layers.


While having Smallworld access Google map layers may seem "last decade", it definitely still has its value.  Extending Smallworld even more to access powerful platforms like MapBox solidly moves Smallworld users from 2007 into 2013.

Welcome to the future!  You can find out more about Smallworld web maps integrations here.

View Beautiful (and Offline) Maps in #swgis

Recently, I have seen much excitement around MapBox's TileMill and the beautiful maps that can be created with that tool. You can definitely do some cool stuff with TileMill.

That made me think back to a year or two ago when I was creating custom map tiles using Maperitive. So I updated my version of Maperitive and had a look. The GUI has had many improvements since I last used it and I really like the Python-based scripting that is now supported. You can also do some really cool map creation with Maperitive. A closer look at both applications showed me that both of them allowed a user to generate output in the MBTiles format.

So I thought that it might be helpful to see if we could view these formats within Smallworld. iFactor Consulting's Web Maps Connector (disclosure: I am the product manager for this product) has been focused on web-based map sources. But because of its flexible framework, it was easy to modify it to read MBTiles.

What does that mean for Smallworld users? Now you can create your own beautiful maps using CartoCSS or Maperitive style sheets and integrate them into Smallworld as additional layers. That is pretty cool, in my opinion. In addition to beautiful maps, you can also use Maperitive or TileMill to generate your background tiles for a predefined service area. Then you can copy the file to a laptop or mobile field device running Smallworld and your field crew will have access to beautiful custom-styled background tiles even when disconnected from the web.

The following video provides some more details of how this all works.