Tonight’s GeoDC meetup at 7:00 pm at Stetson’s Bar on U Street will feature four demos of tools for making web maps. Eric will be giving one of the presentations, walking through how to use TileMill, our open source cartography tool, to design beautiful maps using any data set. He’ll start by showing what’s possible, from making dot maps like this one of health data in Kenya to raster maps of deforestation in the Amazon. He’ll then walk through how to use TileMill to make a completely custom design web map using any data set and get it online using MapBox.
Three other tools will also be demoed at the meetup. Juan Marín from OpenGeo will show how to publish maps online with GeoServer, Andrew Turner will talk about the community behind GeoCommons, and Chris Tucker will talk about how to tell stories maps using MapStory.
It will be interesting to see how these different tools compare for making web maps, and it looks like there will be a big crowd with over 125 RSVPs so far. The GeoDC meetup group meets once a month, usually on the first Wednesday of the month. For updates and related news, follow @geo_dc on Twitter and join the meetup group.