Gathering clouds over the horizon, Part II

I posted earlier an example of a simple Google Map reading a list of Olympic cities - this was part of a list of Google and OpenLayer maps I built over the years on my old website - I also posted a nifty display of plate boundaries in Google Earth here. Following on the discussion of new web mappping (Part I of this post), I recreated both on giscloud.com to see how the two implementations compared.

The Olympiads map does not show the drop-down list allowed in Google's Java API - then again I haven't used the giscloud API. Blue dots show the winter games, orange dots the summer games, and in giscloud you get details including weblinks by clicking on the cities.


For the tectonic plates I went to the source USGS Open File report including the volcanoes - lat/long sign conventions and KML files were a challenge along the antimeridian (lines crossing the date line), but a clean-up posts them right on a Google Map overlay.


Here it is as WGS84 vector world map with a Blue Marble backdrop.


Please note that Google maps are all raster maps in the web browser, whereas giscloud.com maps are all vector, with raster tiles if needed. Also Google doesn't claim to be a GIS at all. These are in fact different tools for different purposes.

Have you heard the expression horses for courses - some race courses are better suited for some race horses - meaning various map types are better for different purposes?