“Making thematic mapping and geospatial development easier than ever”
2019-08-29, 14:00–14:20, Opera Room

Vector rendering has been around for a while. Sending raw data and delegating the rendering to the web browser is a reality not only for privative providers but also available to modern Open Source web-mapping frameworks. Still, vector symbol definitions for thematic mapping is still a challenge. Several initiatives have tried to define their cartographic rendering rules language, but none of them has succeeded to be adopted by the broad community. At CARTO we chose to use Mapbox GL as the base technology for the map component, but we developed our WebGL library to render data on top of it to take advantage of our own server-side Maps API. Our CARTO VL and Maps API combo allows us to deliver rich visualizations with a very concise definition language (also available as a pure JavaScript API) that helps the web developer to define classifications, variables to use later at the web application, aggregations, animations and much more. In this talk, we are presenting the last advances on the development of our library along with a glimpse with the planned features in our roadmap and our plans to integrate it with Airship, our dashboard designing library, and CARTOframes, our python library for Data Scientists.