Summary

OSM is quite literally an entire world of information that is free and available for a wide variety of uses. Because this data is hosted on Amazon S3, the data can be easily accessed and incorporated along with your proprietary geospatial data. This chapter showed you the basics with some examples, and I encourage you to spend some time browsing the wealth of data that can be used in your location-based analytics and visualizations.

Direct data access to features and attributes is tremendously valuable, as we showed in this chapter. However, many geospatial data challenges require map services to provide high performance, availability, and reliability for frequently requested map images. Map and feature services can amplify your organization’s ability to quickly serve high-quality GIS maps to a wide variety of consumers. Mobile apps can cache local copies of map service and feature data to enable workers in no-/low-connectivity areas. The next chapter will describe...