Cloud GIS

In the last few years, there has been a trend in GIS to create online, subscription based services that allow users to upload and visualize their own data.

Focused on design and user experience, a few new players have entered the industry, traditionally lead by ESRI's solutions, and have made GIS and geospatial technology in general available to a broader audience.

Some of them offer free accounts to start playing with, as well as more complex solutions for the big enterprise.

Among all the options out there, let's focus on just three of them.

CARTO Builder

CARTO offers a wide range of products that put together a platform for the analysis and visualization of geospatial data. One of these products is CARTO Builder, which offers the most common functionality in a GIS tool for visualization and analysis, plus sharing options to publish maps online, access to both Open Data and premium, paid datasets from different data providers.

Connectivity with different data sources and integrations with other popular tools are also a strength of the CARTO platform, which is built on top of other well known products like PostGIS or Mapnik.

There is plenty of learning material available about Builder in CARTO's Help Center.

Kepler.gl

Kepler.gl is an Open Source visualization tool developed by Uber, that works fully in the client side (your computer's Internet browser). Along with CARTO and other companies in the tech and geo industries, it's part of the Urban Computing Foundation which "is a neutral forum for accelerating open source and community development that improves mobility, safety, road infrastructure, traffic congestion and energy consumption in connected cities".

Kepler.gl is a great tool for visualizing your data, it has 3D capabilities and a very nice and easy interface.

You can use it withouth registering, and it has some sample data to start working with it right away. There is also a very good user's guide available here

Mapbox

Mapbox provides the building blocks for geospatial applications of many kinds: from cartographic tools for creating basemaps to tools for augmented reality navigation and autonomous cars.

Exercises