On today’s Web, mapping solutions are a natural ingredient. We use them to see the location of things, to search for the position of an address, to get driving directions, and to do numerous other things. Most information has a location, and if something has a location, it can be displayed on a map.
There are several mapping solutions including Yahoo! Maps and Bing Maps, but the most popular one is Google Maps. In fact, according to Programmableweb.com, it’s the most popular API on the Internet. According to the site’s May 2010 statistics, 43 percent of all mashups use the Google Maps API (www.programmableweb.com/apis). In comparison, the second most popular API was Flickr with 11 percent, and the second most popular mapping API was VirtualEarth (Bing Maps) with 3 percent.
Applications and web sites that are combining data or functionality from two or more sources are commonly referred to as mashups. Mashups are becoming increasingly popular and have revolutionized the way information is being used and visualized.
Mapping solutions are one important ingredient in a lot of these mashups. The Google Maps API lets you harness the power of Google Maps to use in your own applications to display your own (or others’) data in an efficient and usable manner.
An example of a mashup using the Google Maps API is the coverage of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It combines data of the extent of the oil spill with Google Maps to visualize its massive impact (Figure 1-1); see http://mw1.google.com/mw-earth-vectordb/disaster/gulf_oil_spill/ gulf_oil_map.html.