Preface

Geographical awareness is an exciting and reassuring concept in general for many people. If a friend were to ask you where you live, you'd normally have a genuine desire to describe where. Better yet, you could show them where you live on a (digital) map. Not only is this exciting, but it's also often extremely relevant and useful to include spatial data in products or services to reveal exactly where something is. We live in a time where information is in abundance, and a lot of this information is susceptible to being represented geographically.

The ubiquity of the Web and the improvement in various browsers' performance has made it possible for the Web to become a major player in the GIS field. It can rival desktop applications because of its capabilities. Browsers now allow us to show data visualizations to the masses, create online data editors, and so on.

Nowadays, OpenLayers isn't without its competing libraries. However, with the new API (v3), it's better focused for mobile, and it remains a comprehensive mapping library to create any kind of web mapping application. In addition to offering a great set of components, such as maps, layers, or controls, OpenLayers also offers access to a great number of data sources using many different data formats and implements many standards from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) (http://www.opengeospatial.org).