The Making of a Web Map

Below you will find several graphs compiled from the information supplied to us by the contest entrants of Directions Magazine Second Annual Web Mapping Contest, sponsored jointly by our publication and Microsoft Corporation.The contest drew 85 entries during the first twenty days of October.We shortened the contest this year by ten days from last year, but still received an overwhelming response from the geospatial community.The information that is compiled is complete as far as what information was given to us by each contestant.Not every entry listed all of the information that was requested.In addition, more than one technology may have been used for each platform.For example, the client side platform may have included HTML, DHTML, and Javascript. Therefore, the results of each statistic will not sum to total number of entries, but they will give you a very good picture of the technology employed by today's web mapping software developers.

In general, the contest yields a very interesting snapshot of the technology that is broadly applied to today's applications that employ geospatial mapping technology for the internet.We hope you take something away from these results and your comments are most welcome.

Hours Invested refers to the number of hours that each contested determined was the time for development.Several noted that it was an ongoing process and other contestants indicated that the time was strictly for this particular application.