2015 - Maps of the Year

It's time once again for the Maps Mania annual round-up of the best interactive maps of the year - nearly.

There are over 100 maps in this year's collection of amazing maps. I've therefore decided to split this up into two parts. Today you get the 2015 Maps of the Year - Part One. This first part of the 100 best maps of the year features interactive maps which were released from January - June 2015. The rest of the year will come next week, in Part Two of the round-up.

You can sort the maps by mapping platform. The platforms include Leaflet, Mapbox, the Google Maps API, CartoDB, Esri and Other.

While browsing the collection you might notice that Leaflet has taken over from the Google Maps API as the mapping platform of choice for the discerning developer. This reflects a general pattern that I've noticed over the last two years, where the Google Maps API is getting used less and less as developers turn more & more to other mapping platforms.

In last year's Maps of the Year round-up I ignored all maps which weren't made with the help of Leaflet, Mapbox, the Google Maps API, CartoDB or Esri. This year I couldn't ignore the high number of great maps which have been created without the help of these mapping libraries. WebGL and JavaScript libraries such as D3.js seem to have encouraged a lot of developers to strike out on their own.

More next week ....