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For an IPhone app I have been building, I decided to use the UIWebView to render SVG files, instead of doing the vector rendering myself. I needed to have a way to read-in files generated from a vector authoring tool (Illustrator etc.) and after initially looking for an open-source SVG parsing/rendering engine of some sort, I decided on hosting the UIWebView itself instead and use the SVG rendering capability of WebKit.

One important concern of cartography is solving how to project, i.e. transform or map points from an almost spherical lump of rock (our Earth) onto either flat sheets of paper or not-so flat phosphorus-coated glass.

Here are informally described important cartographic concepts, how maps are drawn and why there are so many different kinds of projections for world maps. You may start reading here and follow the Click buttons like this one to go ahead buttons, or use this table of contents:

BirdEye is a community project to advance the design and development of a comprehensive open source information visualization and visual analytics library for Adobe Flex. The actionscript-based library enables users to create multi-dimensional data visualization interfaces for the analysis and presentation of information. The project is based on development and the integration/adoption of related open source libraries (see credits and attributions). For status of development, refer to the wiki pages.

GADM is a spatial database of the location of the world's administrative areas (or adminstrative boundaries) for use in GIS and similar software. Administrative areas in this database are countries and lower level subdivisions such as provinces, departments, bibhag, bundeslander, daerah istimewa, fivondronana, krong, landsvæðun, opština, sous-préfectures, counties, and thana. GADM describes where these administrative areas are (the "spatial features"), and for each area it provides some attributes, foremost being the name and variant names.

The jLayout JavaScript library provides layout algorithms for laying out components. A component is an abstraction; it can be implemented in many ways, for example as items in a HTML5 Canvas drawing or as HTML elements. The jLayout library allows you to focus on drawing the individual components instead of on how to arrange them on your screen.

The library currently provides four layout algorithms: border, which lays out components in five different regions; grid, which lays out components in a user defined grid, flex-grid which offers a grid with flexible column and row sizes, and flow which flows components in a user defined direction. A jQuery plugin to lay out (X)HTML elements is also available.

XSLTJSON is an XSLT 2.0 stylesheet to transform arbitrary XML to JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). JSON is a lightweight data-interchange format based on a subset of the JavaScript language, and often offered as an alternative to XML in—for example—web services. To make life easier XSLTJSON allows you to transform XML to JSON automatically.

XSLTJSON supports several different JSON output formats, from a compact output format to support for the BadgerFish convention, which allows round-trips between XML and JSON. To make things even better, it is completely free and open-source.