best tutorials, libraries, and tools for mapping geographic data

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03stories

best tutorials, libraries, and tools for mapping geographic data

in General Discussion • Other • 2 years ago

Seems its been harder than it should be to track down any resources on mapping geographic data. Let's change that.

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What techniques are you using?

What tutorials have you seen?

Are there any good libraries?

What data formats work best?

(I'm particularly interested if there's anything out there using geoJSON, which I haven't found yet.)

Replies(8)

mrslash

Re: best tutorials, libraries, and tools for mapping geographic data

2 years ago

There are a loto of projects around maps and Geography like Polymaps, Google Maps, Modest Maps, CloudMade and OpenLayers.

I hope It could be helpful!

Jo Wood

Re: best tutorials, libraries, and tools for mapping geographic data

2 years ago

I do quite a lot of work with Processing and GIS/mapping. Our giCentre Utilities library for Processing may provide some help. It includes some classes for map projections as well as other graphical techniques that work with geographic data (e.g. standard ellipses that work with lat/long data). We will also be releasing soon a 'slippy maps' library that should make it very easy to link web mapping services such as BingMaps, OpenStreetMap etc. with your own Processing sketches.

See also this useful tutorial for integrating tileMill with Processing.

ericsoco

Re: Re: best tutorials, libraries, and tools for mapping geographic data

2 years ago

great stuff, jo! looking forward to the slippy maps.
the links for TileMill are excellent as well -- i didn't know about it, nor till nagel's processing implementation. really nice to have those tools on hand.

fari

Re: Re: best tutorials, libraries, and tools for mapping geographic data

4 months ago

Can anyone tell me how to use giCentre's mapProjectionExample to display a worldmap?

How do I get the background image and its corresponding coordinates?

akiersky

Re: best tutorials, libraries, and tools for mapping geographic data

2 years ago

here's a rough example that I worked up a few months back that I never ended up using. You enter the latitude and longitude (degrees and .minutes, not actually decimals) in the setup, and it puts ellipses on the map.

You will need a clean, un-distorted map for the background, I got mine here: http://www.skolbilder.com/foto-jorden-utan-molntaecke-polarisarna-i-skugga-dl15643.jpg

I didn't get as far as to extrapolate into a class, but the mechanics are there:

void setup (){
smooth();
size(2160, 1080);
PImage img = loadImage("mapClean.jpg");
image(img, 0, 0, this.width, this.height);
float[] cor = new float[2];
cor = latLongXY(this.width, this.height, -44.33, -123.15);
ellipse(cor[0], cor[1], 10, 10);
float[] grm = new float[2];
grm = latLongXY(this.width, this.height, -42.59, -85.40);
ellipse(grm[0], grm[1], 10, 10);
float[] toj = new float[2];
toj = latLongXY(this.width, this.height, -35.41, 139.40);
ellipse(toj[0], toj[1], 10, 10);
float[] weN = new float[2];
weN = latLongXY(this.width, this.height, 41.16, 174.44);
ellipse(weN[0], weN[1], 10, 10);
float[] tdf = new float[2];
tdf = latLongXY(this.width, this.height, 54.47, -64.25);
ellipse(tdf[0], tdf[1], 10, 10);
float[] cae = new float[2];
cae = latLongXY(this.width, this.height, -30.4, 31.13);
ellipse(cae[0], cae[1], 10, 10);
}
// latLongXY converts degress and .minutes to their x y cordinates and returns an Array with the location on a full screen map
float[] latLongXY(float mapImgW, float mapImgH, float lat, float lon) {
float[] llxy = new float[2];
lat += 89;
lon += 179;
//converts latitude minutes to degree & decimal
float latM = minToDegDec(lat);
float lonM = minToDegDec(lon);
float latY = (latM/180)*(mapImgH);
float lonX = (lonM/360)*mapImgW;
llxy[0] = lonX;
llxy[1] = latY;
return llxy;
}
// minToDegDec takes degrees and decimal-style minutes and converts it to decimal degrees. (60 minutes in a degree)
float minToDegDec (float minutes){
float DegDec = (minutes%1)/.6;
print("\n"+DegDec);// why is this not accurate??
DegDec += minutes;
return DegDec;
}

Hope that helps!

lasko25

Re: Re: best tutorials, libraries, and tools for mapping geographic data

10 months ago

Hey,

I just tested this out. First off, it works perfectly, thank you.

I had a question though. Where (are you?) do you define the view extents of the map to project the ellipses on to? In other words, what if I didn't want my map to be the whole earth?

ericsoco

Re: best tutorials, libraries, and tools for mapping geographic data

2 years ago

oh, and just found this, via till nagel's page on tilemill + processing:
http://unfoldingmaps.org/

lottem

Re: Re: best tutorials, libraries, and tools for mapping geographic data

8 months ago

Thanks eric. That's a great link.

A good think to know is that the GLGraphics library (which is recommended to be installed with the Unfolding library) doesn't work in Processing 2.0, so you have to downgrade to 1.51.
But then I still didn't get it to work on my 4yearoldmacbook in OpenGL, so I set the sketch to P2D instead.

And now it works

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