SHODAN LIVES
Notes and links from @colemanm.
My talk from Ignite Spatial at WhereCampTB, talking about the OSM Tampa Bay meetup group. Check out the slides in better detail here.
It was a fun event a couple weeks ago — great participation from folks in all sorts of industries involved in mapping or using GIS tools.
New ways to look at OpenStreetMap data.
A new Transport layer has been added as a new renderer layer to OSM. The new tiles come courtesy of Andy Allan (of OpenCycleMap) and include things like bike routes, bus routes, subways, rail systems, and train stations.
Even though the Tampa Bay Area doesn’t have quite the vibrant public transit systems of some cities, rendering data for custom use-cases like this shows the real power of the detailed data beneath the surface of OSM. It shows the value of adding things like route information, bus stops, and bike paths. You can see from the map that Tampa has pretty decent coverage of route information, while Pinellas has hardly a thing.
Let’s get in there and change that!
MapBox »
I so want to try out MapBox’s offerings. They provide geospatial datasets as Amazon EBS volumes that you can mount on EC2, an awesome way to source free data for access in your applications. They currently have snapshots of the OpenStreetMap Planet database, US Census TIGER/line data, and NASA’s CGIAR Worldwide DEM.
Even though mapping toolkits like Mapnik, Tilecache, and OpenLayers are getting extremely good, tools like what MapBox provides make it easier to jump into providing your own custom maps and data for mapping apps, instead of relying on Google or Yahoo to handle everything for you. Nothing’s wrong with using those commercial APIs for basemaps, but for certain applications, it makes lots of sense to have more control over your cartographic style.
Cartagen »
Cartagen is a framework for adding rich styles to map data, to produce better cartographics.
You utilize the GSS (geographic style sheet) spec to style map elements from OpenStreetMap data.
