Timesliding canvas maplayer
After someone saw my BAG building data movie 
he asked if it would be possible to create an interactive map of the entire Netherlands. This made me think, since creating the movie was a very time consuming action. The problem is that there are about 6 million buildings in the BAG database. This makes the data a bit unwieldy to use directly in the browser. The old fashioned way to do time series on maps involves creating a new layer for each time-moment (year in this case). This would mean that there would be over 150 layers to be loaded on the map and switching between those for the ‘time sliding’ effect. Apart from the hideous task to set up 150 almost the same layers, it would end up with too much images for a browser to handle.
Dymaxion Map
I’ve been thinking a while about creating a nice SVG map in the Dymaxion projection to hang on my wall – being a GIS expert I need to have a map on my wall 
However Dymaxion is not like most projections and standard GIS software doesn’t support it. Luckily there are some tools available, most important the Perl module Geo::Dymaxion, written by Schuyler Erle. This module transforms lat/long coordinates to dymaxion coordinates relative to an image size. This means it is easy, given an existing dymaxion map to plot point s on top of them, as shown in his book mapping hacks, code here.
kõik – drawing menu
The first short movie in the kõik on the MS Surface series; the drawing menu:
TileSeeder
Design for a python based GUI program for tile management.
(Image taken from the presentation I’m giving at foss4g 2010)
Visualizing OpenStreetMap history – part 2
Thanks to the hard work of Vincent we now have a database with the average version and average age of nodes per grid cell. Now we can start to get a feeling of the data. I’ve rendered both datasets for Amsterdam on a 10x10m grid. In general the idea is that red is bad and green is good. The younger a node is, the more likely it reflects the current situation in the real world. Also the higher the version number, the more people have been looking at that node and corrected it.
At least that is the theory Martijn tries to work with.
The age in days for OpenStreetMap nodes
Visualizing OpenStreetMap history
I’m working with Martijn and Vincent on a way to visualize the history of OpenStreetmap data for their analysis of the ‘crowd-quality’ of the data. I used my favorite visualization tool Processing to visualize the history of one node:
Visualizing gps tracks with Processing
At work we got an i-gotU (a GPS logger) as a Christmas present. To show what one can do with it I decided to ask a few people to use their i-gotU to record their travels for two weeks. This resulted in over 42000 locations done by 8 different persons. Each person got his/her own color in the visualization to be able to see when people were near one another. Since the office is in Amsterdam and most people live in (different parts of) Amsterdam you can quickly see the contours of Amsterdam’s city-plan appear. Also interestingly is to note that people have their own specific areas where they spend most of their time.
WFS 1.1.0, GML 3.1.1 and OpenLayers
In the INSPIRE framework we are working on the ESDIN project and are using the EuroGeoNames (EGN) project as an implementation of ESDIN. INSPIRE is a big thing within the GIS world in Europe and loads of documents have been written so far.
We’re involved in both ESDIN and EGN and we decided to use the latter as a trial for the first. Together with our partners we’ve setup a series of servers to fulfill the needs of the projects. The main standard used is the latest WFS and GML versions, which have the annoying disadvantage that there are few clients available.
Cape Town day2
My lightning talk yesterday went pretty well, there is a flickr photo of me stating “Steven gave a great lightning talk obituary for MapBuilder at the Plenary session.” There was a wonderful talk by Schuyler, which fortunately is videotaped, but due to the insane slow internet I haven’t seen yet. Also fun was the talk by Ed Parsons from google. He talked (amongst others) about Map Maker and a fairly though discussion resulted about OSM, map maker and data sharing. The interesting bit is that they’re not against sharing their data, it is just that they don’t have a proper license to do so (nor does OSM for that matter). It will be interesting to see what is going to happen in this space. Apparently the lawyers think that it is all public domain and don’t fancy writing a proper CC/FOSS-style license for geodatasets. They state that geodata are facts and facts are not copyrightable.
Unfortunately today was slightly less successful, apparently quite some presenters couldn’t make it after all and three of the talks I was looking forward to weren’t there. SO hopefully the BOF on openlayers and extjs will be better. Interesting projects to look into at home so far are: QGIS-mapserver and Mapfaces.
Is it better to burn out, or to fade away?
Last week we, the Mapbuilder PSC, have decided to gracefully terminate Mapbuilder. We found that other webmapping projects (notably OpenLayers) had passed us in userbase, developbase and finally also in features. We decided that the answer of the ageold question is to burn out. We’ve sent out an announcement that we have reached the end of life of Mapbuilder. It is a sad day…
Dark skies are looming over me
But in general I think this is a good thing and OpenLayers will grow even faster, it is a great package after all.