Mapbox

aerial photography of concrete road near rock mountain

Location tools for developers

Location is an increasingly essential part of software, as consumers come to expect real-world context in technology products. And for the last decade, Mapbox has been carving a new path forward in the industry. Mapbox is a mapping and location cloud platform for developers. They provide the building blocks for developers and designers to build location-aware applications with their leading geospatial SDKs and APIs.

We assemble Mapbox’s building blocks

Although Mapbox is inherently simple to use for developers, navigating the build of a web mapping application has its challenges. There’s an onboarding process, a ramp-up time in identifying the right tools to use, the planning phase, then writing the code to actually build the product. And of course, you have to worry about hiring the right people to build it. That’s why Mapbox partnered with Sparkgeo. Mapbox provides the building blocks for scalable geospatial infrastructure, whilst Sparkgeo helps assemble and configure them.

Location data is increasingly important to the work we all do.

Our Mapbox certified developers add location capacity into apps

Sparkgeo adds geospatial capacity to Mapbox users by providing technical resources and project management capabilities on their projects. This enables developers and designers using Mapbox products to speed up their development and deployment time. Your team can accelerate development and get past technical barriers with much more ease, with the help of a certified Mapbox partner like us.

That’s what we’re here for. Whether that’s assistance with building out turn-by-turn navigation, on-premises data delivery with Atlas, data visualization, geospatial logistics or location search, we have the people to help build a custom solution for any Mapbox user.

Mapbox projects we work on:

Terradactile centralizes and visualizes elevation data

Terradactile is a 3D application built using Mapbox’s GL JS v2 web SDK to enable developers to easily download hillside Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs based on the AWS Terrain Tile dataset. We chose Mapbox for Terradactile because of the enormously flexible GL JS mapping library and its ability to consume Cloud optimized GeoTIFs with little effort.

We should also note that we converted Terradactile to Mapbox’s new 3D library, very quickly. Any web map can now be 3D, and probably should be. We can talk more about this.


MERMAID is an open source data platform for coral reef scientists

MERMAID is an online/offline application that Sparkgeo developed and continues to support on behalf of the Wildlife Conservation Society. It was designed for coral reef scientists in the field. The application standardizes data inputs that are used to quantify reef health and function. It stores data locally when internet access is limited, then syncs up in the cloud when internet connectivity is restored.


Woodwell Climate Research Center maps carbon emissions impacts

The Woodwell climate data explorer is a climate data sharing portal designed to help a broad stakeholder audience understand how the climate of the Pan-Amazon network of indigenous lands and protected areas (ILPAs) is already changing and may change in the future. This is a great example of multiple sources and types of data being aggregated into a single, consumable visualization designed for experts and citizen scientists alike.

We chose Mapbox GL JS for this application, because of its easy integration with d3.js charts. For building data rich, consumer-facing applications, using Mapbox makes sense.


/quick-map for Slack adds maps to conversations

Sometimes a chat needs a map, sometimes a map needs a chat. Either way, we created /quick-map last year to provide that functionality in Slack, the leading corporate messaging tool. We were the first, and remain the only mapping integration on Slack.

We chose Mapbox because of its flexibility, variety of mapping styles, simple pricing, and ease of consumer deployment. On the strength of a few tweets, we picked up a surprising number of organizations and users. This told us a simple story: maps are useful in conversation. Of course, at Sparkgeo, we’ve always known this but never put it together in a digital manner.


OPA maps population health to amplify disease prevention strategies

Health behaviours, environment and inequities are major risk factors for cancer, diabetes and heart disease. For many developing nations, overall “life-span” has increased.  At the same time, improved “health-span” has suffered. We designed this map experience to identify where the greatest impact can be had in “last mile” geographies – the often neglected neighborhoods, postal codes and communities where needs are great but access, resources, opportunities are most limited. 


Canadian Institute of Forestry standardizes and enables access to open urban forestry data across Canada

The open urban forests map is a project designed to standardize and enable access to open urban forestry data across Canada, regardless of where this data is stored and its format.


“Mapbox trusts Sparkgeo to develop elegant solutions for our customers’ most complex geospatial problems.

They have a deep understanding of our tools, and array of experience in geospatial technologies, databases, and software development that helped us get past the finish line on many occasions”

— Will White, Head of Sales at Mapbox