I’ll start off by saying: I am not a fan of the common web-maps. I think Google Maps, MapQuest, etc… etc… are horrible and I hate working with them but that’s just my personal opinion. Despite my vendetta, the “Anatomy of a Web Map” was an interesting site. I thought it was interesting how the whole premise in the beginning is “tiles are revolutionary in the web-map field!!!” when they are commonly used in satellite image analysis, which just highlights the evolutionary process and history of mapping. While a map from Google might be divided into “tiles” a satellite map is divided in “scenes” based on the satellite’s orbit around the earth. I had some issues with “Anatomy of a Web Map”, mostly because it took forever to load, but also their emphasis on raster layers, tiles, and base-maps. As someone who has experience making physical paper, digital, and web maps, vectors layers are much easier to work with and base-maps make everything a nightmare. This site really made me aware of my mapping preferences. A map like Google maps, although commonly used, is incredibly weak. Many areas of the world either do not have any information or the information is wrong. A program like Open Street Maps is cool however because you can go in and add missing data and change the map versus accepting the map as truth.
I preferred the “Introduction to Web Mapping” over the “Anatomy of a Web Map” just because it’s more in line with how I like to make and use maps. Both sources can be applied to this great map I found of the most popular professions in American cities according to Linkedin profiles. And there is a map of the most popular professions in European cities on the same page as well. The link to the page is provided below. These maps are great examples of dynamic, interactive maps. The symbology is great, using colors to represent different qualitative data. While the base-map may use tiles to load the symbol layer doesn’t. This is in comparison to Instagram’s method of grouping pictures taken in close proximity more and more depending on the zoom level, which many people have written about. Each point in the symbol layer will be shown at any zoom level. This makes sense because the data is divided by city and isn’t group also by geographic region or state or etc…. This is one reason why I have a beef with tile-based web-maps and base-maps; sometimes the level of their data and dynamics are different to the dynamics of the actual data points.