What are Reddit's favorite GIS Apps?
QGIS
CartoDB
GRASS GIS
PostGIS
Mapserver
SpatiaLite
uDig
QLandkarte GT
OpenLayers
gvSIG Desktop
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At the moment it is literally just an idea in my head.
I honestly am thinking of reddit as a website that could potentially help organize something like this. We're a big social media site, but also at the same time we have big populations of scientists on here, as well as programmers, and plenty of people interested in organizing and things like that.
I guess step 1 would be organizing people together, and then developing a working prototype of the system we'd like to use. QGIS is a free to use open source GIS(geographic information system) software that could be utilized for something like this. I'm currently not familiar with how to work it, but it is not too difficult to learn (and also there are a lot of people out there who already are skilled with it).
I do wonder if we could attempt to gather together as many interested people as possible and try to do a collaborative project for creating something like this. It is definitely better than nothing, I think there could be some unique benefits and appeal to such a thing.
It's short for Geographic Information System, applications you can create maps with. If you want to try one, go to http://www.qgis.org/en/site/. And I can recommend the map data from here: http://www.naturalearthdata.com/.
GRASS GIS is used mostly for sophisticated spatial analysis. Almost any tool in ArcGIS has an equivalent in GRASS 6 or 7. It's popular an academic circles as they want open source analytic tools where the code can be inspected and even tailored to their needs. It has a fairly steep learning curve, though it has extensive help documentation.
If you're just making simple maps, you're better off using QGIS.
Download OSgeo4w, it installs QGIS and other GIS software and utilities, including GRASS and Saga GIS that are accessible as plugins from within QGIS.
In case anyone is curious, the data that map uses is TIGER data, which is free from the US Census Bureau. If you want to use that data yourself, you can do so with ArcGIS (the industry standard, many schools might offer it to their students for free through a VM), QGIS (the open source free option), or any other GIS program. In addition to roads, TIGER data has other types of information, such as demographic info.
I'm assuming a lot of people on this subreddit are already knowledgeable of GIS, but hopefully this will be of use to some of those who aren't.
Easy, get data from here: https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/tiger-data.html
Get QGIS from here: http://www.qgis.org/en/site/forusers/download.html
Load data into QGIS.
Draw a selection polygon over area
Right click on the shapefile layer (in the layers dialog), save selected data as a new shapefile.
Right click on new shapefile of your area, open up some sort of attribute table.
Copy paste to Excel, sum the population.
(I should note it's been a while since I've used QGIS)
Try QGIS as a good start. There's a built-in plug-in to georeference images. You can take the historical maps and using points on those maps that you can identify the modern location of you'll be able to align, stretch and warp them so the rest of the map falls into place. Obviously the more points for georeferencing you can find the better the fit.
Thank you! I work at CartoDB, a startup dedicated to visualising data in maps in innovative ways. We have a tool to import geolocated data from Twitter, and I personally work daily on Torque, our time-based animated maps. So being a megafan of RoosterTeeth, I spent a few minutes last night making this.
Anyone can make maps like this (although you need to contact us to access the twitter importer). In fact you can use the dataset I made about RT right now.
You would need to learn the basics of a GIS program (used to create/analyse maps), like QGIS. Can't really explain that in a reddit comment, a bit complicated, but there are documentation/courses/stuff around for that.
Then you get the data from OpenOS (learning what type of data to get and how to use it is part of the "basics" of using QGIS) and put it in QGIS, then use the basic skills you have to work it into a map like this for example, it's not difficult in itself, but just learning how to use the program takes a while (although I guess just learning how to do this would be simple, it's like 5 steps, but you won't be able to apply that to anything else really..).
Or you already know GIS and just wanted some more info on this specific map, in which case I'm sorry that I wasted your time, I can't help you much (well, I could but I won't cause I'm lazy).
This data can be grabbed for free from the City of Toronto website as an ESRI Shapfile. All you have to do is throw it into a GIS like QGIS, change the projection and crop and you're done! Since it's .shp it'll also give you attribute info such as the park name.
You can use some free software known as QGIS to do this.
You can download it from here
I would then suggest to work through the tutorials below
https://www.qgistutorials.com/
If you're interested in webmapping it is easy to create them using plug-ins within the QGIS environment.
Agreed. I've used UDig and while it's pretty powerful if you get into it, it's not nearly as comparable to ArcGIS as QGIS.
Even gvSig, which is hardly popular, gets more mention among GIS folks than UDig these days.
I think its great as a simple GIS database. It also works great as a backend database for smaller web GIS applications. Its also handy in that it can be put in an application and loaded to a mobile device for offline use.
For a file storage format I prefer geopackage because spatialite has about 5MB of overhead in every file that I assume is all the SQL code for the spatial functions which geopackage does not have. Thats a good bit of extra backage if you just want to email some data to someone.
I agree that the documentation could be better but it implements the same OGC SFS standard as PostGIS and so most of the functions are interchangeable. If you're not sure you can check http://www.gaia-gis.it/gaia-sins/spatialite-sql-4.2.0.html
My main concern is that I'm not sure how much effort is going into maintaining it anymore. Does anyone know if it is really an open source project or if its being maintained just by Alessandro Furieri? I'd love to see it get some foundation support. Its too good to let slip away IMHO.
I made a simple plugin to dump each planet's height data to a file, with precision of 0.1 degrees (resulting in the 3600x1800 size). I then used Grass to process and render the slope maps.
The colors should be consistent across all images:
- 0 degrees: black
- 14 degrees: purple
- 21 degrees: dark blue
- 28 degrees: blue
- 35 degrees: cyan
- 42 degrees: green
- 49 degrees: yellow
- 56 degrees: red
- 63+ degrees: white
Thanks for updating your post. You are right on with your pseudo code. The deal with coordinate systems is that the geom column on parcels2013 and your GPS data must be in the same coordinate system in order for you to use any spatial functions or predicates (INTERSECT, WITHIN, etc...)
The geometry datatype has a SRID property that gives you the code that represents coordinate system of the data. You can query this property using ST_SRID. GPS data is usually in the WGS84 coordinate system (SRID=4326). You must 1) reproject your incoming GPS data to match the coordinate system of your geom column or 2) change your geom column on parcels2013 to a geography datatype and reproject the data to WGS84 (SRID=4326).
You can try OpenLayers, which is what OpenStreetMap uses. It doesn't create the image files for you, of course, but it does allow for Google Maps-style web interface. Setting it up for a single image file is fairly easy - if you want to optimise it for multiple zoom levels, it takes a bit of tinkering.
You need special GIS software to open .shp files, unfortunately. QGIS is an open-source GIS utility.
I work professionally with ArcGIS and will make a map of dry precincts tomorrow at work, I'll update this comment with a link.
QGIS can export to SVG through the print composer. I've found that when you're doing a tonne of layers at once it can be a bit screwy at times, but it should work fine for a single layer because the problems I had were always about interactions between layers.
Are you expected to learn ArcGIS specifically? Is that what other people in your organization are using?
If not, then you should learn QGIS. It's free, open source, etc. Runs on a mac. Search this subreddit (or google) for resources on learning it and you will find many.
If you have to learn ArcGIS, then you will either need a Windows machine or you will have to run it using Parallels or Boot Camp (and will need a Windows license as well).
The learning curve for both programs feels a little bit steep right at the beginning, but if you are sharp you shouldn't have any trouble picking up the basic skills over the course of about a month. The main things to focus on initially are learning about data formats and file types, some basic geoprocessing operations, and how to make an actual map (legends, color schemes, etc.)
Both ArcGIS and QGIS have extensive online help documentation, and you can always come to this subreddit or gis.stackexchange.org with specific questions as you go along. Don't sweat it, you can do it!
GDAL is a library for data abstraction (Geospatial Data Abstraction Library) so it is definitely not ArcPy. There really is no perfectly equivalent open source ArcPy module. However what you might be looking for is PyQGIS
However, most of the time when writing Python code for GIS you'll want to just use a combination of Python modules. Here is a good answer to a similar question.
I'll give you some superficial answers for now and hopefully some other posters will provide more detail.
The most common free GIS software is Quantum GIS. It's quite good and works fine on a Mac.
Any GIS software will certainly be able to handle the issue of mapping images onto a sphere, this is handled by defining a projection for your map. Any GIS software comes with a directory of preset projections for the world. Defining the parameters of the world that isn't Earth is a topic that I would probably characterize as "advanced", but it should be doable. The help topic you would probably want to start with would be "defining a custom projection" or something like that.
I've found the QGIS documentation site to be helpful: http://www.qgis.org/en/docs/index.html#22
They include a "gentle introduction to GIS" which should prove useful for someone just starting to stick their toes into the GIS waters.
The ESRI site has (or did... haven't looked there in a while) a ton of documentation, both free and paid, if he wants to stick with their products.
Edit: clarity.
I am no Machine Learning guy, but here are few things i personally use.
ArcPy, which comes along ArcGIS. Which has good online docs and examples.
As an alternative to ArcPy, you could use Qgis http://www.qgis.org/en/docs/pyqgis_developer_cookbook/index.html
As you also mention that you have a huge data set, i guess you must be using some DB to store that. In that case you might want to look at PostGIS(http://postgis.net/) which also provides excellent GIS functionality (Which i used for a project last semester, apart from installation pains, it was good experience )
It's damned handy to know. I use it all the time. If you have access to the software, you can get up to speed with tutorials in about a week.
Also, there's open source GIS available. For some things, it works better than E$RI's commercial software. It's mostly just a different GUI. I'm more comfortable with E$RI, but that's because they sink their fangs into you early in your career if you aren't careful, and it's hard to pull away from that teat once you're used to it. You can probably go to Stack Exchange and get some pointers on where to start teaching yourself with QGIS. Might be better to learn this way, so you don't get hooked on expensive commercial software.
Hmm, Quantum (http://www.qgis.org/) works for mac. But I'm not quite sure what you want to do here. Do you want to create a polygon for each area? or a just re-georeference that raster map? In which case xinhuj's idea of using google earth, referencing it, then shipping it out as a KML might be easier.
So easy in CartoDB (http://cartodb.com)! And definitely this project would fit in the free account. http://docs.cartodb.com/tutorials.html#creating-a-simple-map-of-points is the tutorial that will get you going
I think you could implement this with MapServer but it would take some configuration on your part. I can't find if MapServer generates a REST endpoint but if it does, you can add your data that way.
If you can spend the money then Tableau Software will do all the heavy lifting with just a few clicks.
If you have time and not so much of a budget then you can run your own mapserver and store data using postgresql. You'll need to find maps with corresponding shapefiles for zip code boundaries. This data is freely available in the States I believe. In Canada, I think it needs to be licensed through Canada Post.
ArcGIS and other geographical analytical software gives you a lot more flexibility in what you want to do but it's also prohibitively expensive if you're not attached to a university with a site license or a job willing to pay for it
ninja edit: Tableau doesn't have choropleth mapping yet but they do allow overlay of data by region on maps
I'm using http://www.qlandkarte.org/ when viewing and editing GPX tracks - it can use rendered OSM maps from osm.org as a background. On Android I use OsmAnd+, it downloads the OSM data in vector format (which the makers of OsmAnd provide about once a month) and displays it quite nicely.
If you wanted to create an in depth custom mountain range there is some good free GIS software here http://grass.osgeo.org/ but if you don't want to download anything or have to navigate a damn near impossible interface You can use the topographical selection in Google maps over a chunk of the Appalachian mountains or over the Caucasians to get a lord of the rings-esque mountain range map.
Not sure how in-depth you're trying to go, but are have you looked at GIS? The biggest open source one I know of is GrassGIS. It's probably overpowered compared to what you are trying to do, but since you said you didn't want to reinvent the wheel I thought I would toss this out there. Specifically, this area of their site: http://grass.fbk.eu/screenshots/web.php
You probably already saw it, but here is a page with lots of examples:
http://www.openlayers.org/dev/examples/
And if you want to make a pretty map with your own styling and if it's not to big, go to http://mapbox.com where you can make your own, and they host it for free (if there is less than 3000 views/month)
Of course, you can style it and put on your own server for hosting.
No worries! The Geographic Information System (GIS) community is very active online so you can find a whole bunch of information about it. But it all depends on what you intend to use it for.
If you're new to mapping in general I'd suggest downloading QGIS which is a open source mapping program. Just play around, watch some tutorials and read the QGIS user guide which has plenty of information. Coursera also offers some courses on GIS.
Feel free to PM if you have any specific questions or if you were looking for something in particular! :)
I've heard good things about QGIS. It's free, has training material, and it says on the site that it's easy to use. I'm not sure if it's used commercially, but it might be a good learning resource.
If you're willing to put in a little bit of work, Statistics Canada has pretty high-quality shapefiles for national and provincial boundaries. If you install QGIS (it's free), you'll be able to open them, customize the symbology, and export it to an image or PDF at a high quality.
I use QGIS, which I've found is unparalleled for data visualization work. The rendering quality is fantastic, and it has all sorts of symbology tools built in that you'd usually find in photoshop: things like layer and feature blending, contrast/brightness etc.
I do also do some minor tweaks in GIMP afterwards, but only tools that apply to the whole map and so don't alter the data itself (i.e. curves etc).
I love QGIS and it looks like they claim it works on macs.
Out of curiosity, why the hell would you switch in that direction? Seems pretty foolhardy to me if you work with geospatial data, you are cutting in half AT BEST the software packages you can use.
With a bit of a learning curve on grids, coordinate systems, projections and the like... A proper GIS system allows you to see a great deal of different information in the same interface.
QGIS is open source and quickly becoming the standard, you can add layers from government servers depending on availability. Things like geological and metallurgical maps, old parish maps, geo-referenced photos you've taken of maps in books or whatever. OSGeo4W installer will include this and a bunch of tools like GDAL.
You can then export layers you create as KML, GPX or whatever is needed.
I forgot: OC has an API available for everyone to make apps and whatnot (I myself use it to use its cache map in qgis with any map I like).
Only downside of OC is that it's not international. If only there was a basic interoperability (like shared account, to login and cache at other nodes), I'd be in heaven.
Here's the quick and dirty of it:
Professional GIS software is expensive. Lots of schools have licences and can give out free copies to students. So unless you are planning on going back to school or have a stupid amount of money to throw down, don't worry about that. In the meantime, use an open source software!!
There are a ton of tutorials available on youtube and accross the web.
The main programming language associated with GIS is Python, so that would be good to start learning. It was literally written to be easy/simplified.
A handful of basic, essential processes/concepts to read/watch/practice about(others can help me fill out this list): Buffers, Intersections, Table Joins, Clips, Reclassification, and much, much more. Oh, you can also import X,Y data from an excel spreadsheet into GIS software and display those as points on a map!!
The basic file format for gis is a shapefile. The internet is full of data! Just start poking around things that are interesting to you. For example: http://egis3.lacounty.gov/dataportal/
Good luck!
If you have not done so yet, you can get a free 30 day trial with Esri products that will give you the time you need to practice and touch up your skills. If you've already done this then download QGis. It's a free open source GIS platform and can certainly give you a way to practice your GIS skills some more. It doesn't make as pretty maps as ArcGIS but it gets the job done.
And as someone else mentioned already, Getting to Know ArcGIS is a really helpful book.
Not familiar with Maptitude, but QGIS is free, open-source, and highly customizable. It is especially nice when you have programming knowledge as you can write your own plugins/extensions fairly easily.
QGIS also easily connects to Postgres/PostGIS for database management.
For example, here is a heat map plugin example: QGIS Heat Map Plugin
Here's a case study about the City of Uster, who dumped ESRI for QGIS.
http://www.qgis.org/en/site/about/case_studies/suisse_uster.html
Here's a company supporting FOSS GIS
You should be able to use QGIS.
I don't think you can rotate a layer in it, but you can rotate the labels (so flip labels 180, then flip the image I guess). Not sure if it supports that particular projection though
I think looking into non-coding options to start is a really good idea. It will get you used to the kind of thing you'll see when building a web map from scratch, so when you eventually see it in code you'll have a better idea of what's going on.
Edit: another non-coding option that I really like is CartoDB
Hi, would you be interested in working with CartoDB (http://cartodb.com)? We have an office in Madrid, so that could work well. If so, shoot me an email andrew at cartodb com and let me know what you are looking to do.
That's an interesting link, thanks.
Similarly, have a look how the Brazil vs. Germany game played out on Twitter. You'd expect Germany to have a huge activity, but it's much less than in neighboring countries.
Also, you seem to think mostly Germans would follow Özil on Facebook. But football a global sport, he plays in the UK, and at Arsenal at that. Arsenal is the stereotypical club for US soccer fans to follow, so the pool of potential fans is much larger.
Sure! I was running dump1090 (https://github.com/antirez/dump1090) using the mode that outputs the raw data to port 30003. So I launched it with: ./dump1090 --aggressive --interactive --net --net-sbs-port 30003 then in another terminal I launched netcat to save that to a CSV: nc 127.0.0.1 30003 >> flights.csv
That CSV was then uploaded to http://cartodb.com which lets you make quick beautiful visualizations of geodata. Pretty simple. I'm working on making some tools for analyzing the raw dump file, giving you charts of the most busy times, number of flights, etc.
tl;dr: For me it's practicality and philosophy, in that order.
It started for me at work for a county government (USA) 15-20 years ago.
I was a beginning developer doing geo-stuff using the typical local government Microsoft stack (asp, VB, similar horrors) and very expensive (our maintenance contract alone was 6 figures) proprietary mapping software. We released a web mapping app and discovered, in a very public way, that our proprietary mapping software's web product was a crashware turd. Of course we can't poke in this black box to see what's wrong, let alone fix it, and the vendor gave us a very official looking shrug. In desperation I ran across MapServer from the University of Minnesota. I didn't know anything about open source software, and I figured this free thing couldn't possibly do the job of our 6-figure crashware turd, but desperate times. Boy was I wrong. It was faster, perfectly stable, more functional, used open standards, and to top it off, it was much easier to use.
That kicked off everything. I learned about open source and its history, started using open source programming languages and tools, started contributing to other projects, started giving talks on open source geo at conferences, and eventually we (local government) started releasing our own open source projects on github. I use Linux (Manjaro) at home, and my dev environment is tmux/vim and a lot of nodejs/python/r work. Now I'm gaming with a AMD RX 560 with an open source driver, which blows my mind. And things get better faster. It isn't hyperbolic to say open source revitalized my career and my passion for programming.
I love the community and philosophy of open source, but what drew me and keeps me here is that for the things I want to do, open source software is better.
You might look into MapServer. Fairly easy to implement on a small server, Apache freindly, a little PHP-heavy for my taste (or at least it was when I set one up a few years ago), but that made it all the easier to learn & go.
try the gui tool for sqlite3/spatialite: http://www.gaia-gis.it/gaia-sins/windows-bin-amd64-test/
then you can import some test data to make your life easier.
Then check out what to do in python. There's a bunch of short demos around the web. But the gui up there should make life a little more easy to learn the SQL part.
You want to do what's called resampling or if you don't have ArcGIS. This will involve some type of interpolation, cubic convolution is probably best for an elevation model.
Grass GIS has a tool called v.out.svg. You should be able to write a quick python script to automate the query of each and then export it to an SVG file.
If you use Arc, you could also automate this using arcpy.mapping.
There are also SVG related plugins in QGIS.
PostGIS is an "extension" to the open source Postgresql relational database. It allows you store and manage geographic features inside of Postgres. Postgesql/Postgis can run on windows or linux. A number of client software can connect to postgis, including Quantum GIS and Arcmap(with ST-links spatial kit extension). You can export out of postgis formats such as KML, SVG or GeoJson. You can also use it as your datastore for web maps in conjunction with Geoserver or you can use PHP/Python/others to create a REST api.
PostGIS's biggest claim to fame is that it has what I believe to be the widest set of spatial operators and functions of any database management system. For instance you can issue a query that selects and then buffers a set of records from one "layer" and use this buffer result to select from another layer.
I almost hesitate to try to steer you toward online resources, because so many are so bad, or so focussed on using ArcGIS (which I think is a pretty terrible tool much of the time).
If you're a "just dive in" kind of person, you might take a look at Ch. 4 of the PostGIS manual for a sampling of GIS questions posed using SQL. Reading that was where I had the aha! moment ("you mean I can SQL this stuff?"). Most of the functions in PostGIS work nearly identically in Spatialite.
For a basic software-neutral description of GIS, the Wikipedia page is okay.
More importantly, if you're a stats student in college, you could consider taking a class or two outside the econ department. If you have an urban planning department, you could take an urban economics class. Urban econ will give you some theoretical basis for economics principles applied to location. Or, if you're looking for a nuts and bolts kind of intro, your geography (or again, the urban planning) department should have intro courses.
Good luck! Sorry I didn't have any amazing online resources to point you to...
> I have a 2D map (pdf file
GeoPDF or PDF?
I'd probably load it up in QGIS and use mapping tools rather than attempting to draw pixels on top of a bitmap.
/r/qgis /r/gis
On windows OSGeo4w package for all the related tools:
As a cartographer I have to say your suggestions really hit the spot. Depiction of relief would be more than helpful in a game like this! Most importantly the implementation of contour lines and relief shading (you referred to it as shadows). For both of these element a Digital Elevation Model (DEM) is needed. (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_elevation_model) It is then quite an easy task to generate both, the contour lines, and the relief shading from the DEM in every GIS (Geo Information System) as for example QGIS (http://www.qgis.org/de/site/ free to use). A bit of tinkering in a graphic software (Illustrator etc.) to make it look decent would still be needed though. I'd love to get my hands on the map data to help out.
G.Projector is probably the best. If you want something more advanced then you need something like QGis which is FAR more complex (like comparing MS Paint to Adobe Photoshop)
So download the "shapefile" and just use the DBF file. A "shapefile" format from ArcMap (which I'm sure the local GIS people are using) is not just a single .shp file, it's usually a set of ~4-7 files that include the projection, the database, etc. If you have to use the KMZ, then unzip it to get the KML, which is a form of XML. If you can't write your own script to standardize that into a CSV, then use something like Open Refine to do the modifications.
But I do have another thought.... If you're serious about studying a spatial phenomenon, then you really ought to be using GIS software. Dividing things up by street and neighborhood and zip is great - except those units are arbitrarily defined (and they change over time). How are you going to analyze clusters and hotspots and all of that? The whole point of GIS software is to study the spatial phenomena exactly in the way you're talking about. It's literally all of the same database stuff... plus each record appears on a map window. Why wouldn't you use it?
Edit: Also, you might want to look into QGIS since you're not a Windows user: http://www.qgis.org/en/site
Hi, you could try QGIS (Quantum GIS) http://www.qgis.org/en/site/
It is an open source GIS system that works on windows, linux or mac so should fine for you. I have never used it, I am lucky enough to have acces to ArcGIS via work but I have heard good things about it from friends. I found a quick guide on how to use it to georeference things: http://netpalantir.it/news/index/how-to-georeference-an-image
Fingers crossed this will work for you.
You could do all of this with a GIS application such as QGIS. If you are not familiar with GIS you will probably face a quite steep learning curve. Nevertheless QGIS matches all of your requirements, although not out of the box. With a little (possibly a lot) tinkering you should get what you want.
Let's go through your bullet points:
- QGIS is available for OSX, Windows and linux.
- The "Profile Tool" plugin does this. You need to feed it with a digital elevation model. Some countries has high resolution data as free downloads, otherwise NASA supplies a lower resolution model of most of the world.
- Have a look at the pgRouting plugin. I think this is the most difficult part. I am not very familiar with this, so it might not do exactly what you want. An alternative to this step is to just draw the route by hand, which probably will be faster for shorter trips anyway.
- OSM maps are easily loaded into QGIS
- QGIS can export data in GPX format
Have fun :-)
Grad student in geography here.
What kind of data are you starting out with, if any? And what kind of map do you want to end up with? Are you looking to sketch out maps but not necessarily connect it to a specific dataset for really precise locating?
I use Illustrator a lot for static maps. You can find vector maps in AI format online to use as a basemap, then just color them in how you want, add in symbols, a legend, title, labels, whatever. Alternately, you could find a reference map you like and then draw over it.
If I'm using a data set with geospatial data, I'll put it in a geographic information system program (GIS) and design the map in there, which is also where to do any geospatial processing (example might be finding all the distances to a central point). Then once it looks okay in the GIS, I'll export it to Illustrator so I can refine how it looks. I use ArcGIS because my department gets it for free (software brainwashing!) but there's also QGIS if you want free / open source.
If you don't have a dataset with specific spatial information (for example if you have a list of countries and a value of some kind, and you just want to visualize the value for each country), a GIS might be a bit overkill. I've made quick maps from simple datasets using CartoDB, and it's pretty easy.
Are you saying that you already have the georeferencing file? I'm familiar with world files, which have extensions like .tfw, .pnw, and .jpw, and are used to relate an image to geographic coordinates. I've never heard of a map file for this purpose.
I found something called Viking which might serve your purposes. I've never used it, but it sounds like it might check your boxes.
You could also use QGIS with the Georeferencer GDAL and GPS Tools plugins. If you can output your maps in GeoTIFF format, or if you can output a world file, you can open the maps with the software and get right to making the GPX. If you can't get the georeferencing imported, use the georeferencer plugin.
There are some councils and local authorities in the UK who are migrating to QGIS or at least using it along side ESRI software, MapINFO etc.
Here's two talks given at the UK QGIS user group meeting, from Brecon Beacons National Park Authority and Neath Port Talbot County/Borough Council about their experience migrating to QGIS and open source GIS database PostgreSQL/PostGIS. The second talk is most applicable.
In the OSM world, the term 'edit' means you are actually changing the data. You just want to use the data in vector format and style it. Seems like a good opportunity to learn some GIS. QGIS is free, allows you to download OSM data with point and click, and you can do some of your styling in the software before bringing in to your graphics program.
If you only need this done for this one project, find a GIS person to get it in the format that you want. It's one of those things that would take no time for someone who has done it before and it'd save you the headache.
QGIS is waaayy more user-friendly than GRASS though. Not as powerfull GIS-wise, but easier for the uninitiated.
Great thing about using actual mapmaking software is that you can find free spatial data, like city blocks or roads. Mapping neighborhoods becomes really quick and easy.
My favorite, though, is taking a screenshot on google earth, run the image in paint.net or some such and make it look like an aerial photograph out of a spy movie.
Unfortunately, QGIS is really hurting for these type of industry-standard analysis libraries that would enable people like me who want to leave ESRI behind to really do it.
There is a network analysis Python library for QGIS if you're comfortable with the scripting API, but I don't know if I care enough about burritos that I would learn it just for this project.
Also, cartographic styling note: it is impossible to interpret what this map means without a scale bar!
PASDA has all of the data you need. I have been doing GIS work in the Pittsburgh area for a while now including a good bit of 3D work. I would recommend the 3.2 meter LiDAR data, .las if you can handle it, otherwise they have vector and dem files as well.
Edit: Sorry I only read the first half of the post, QGIS can help you with most of the file formats. Depending on the CAD software you're using you might be able to find a plugin to handle the format.
You can also use qgis instead of esri, don't know if they have that plugin, but you can use it on your Mac and its open source so you can can install it for everyone, or use cheep if you want to use it on your job.
If you've never used GIS software before DO NOT install esri stuff, start with qgis and maybe if you truly need it upgrade to ESRI.
I'd suggest ArcMAP but it's hella expensive. There's similar free products like qgis. Not sure if it can export as universally as ESRI can, but it's worth a shot.
It almost sounds like you just want a graph/chart rather than a map...so it really depends on what you want your finished product to look like.
If you're looking to go opensource and convert the data to a visual representation you're gonna be looking at QGIS primarily. This will allow you to add GPS point shape files and assign data to each point. From here you can get into data manipulation once you have everything good to go. Im really not going to get into the nitty gritty of how to use it, tons of docs around qgis though. You can add data to your points in a fashion like this. If you're looking to set up categories and have unique colours you'll want to look into symbology/categories and classifications. I don't know QGIS well enough to know how robust those features are.
Does not sound like it would be to overtly complicated really based on what you've said.
GIS Analyst here, GRASS can be a PITA to use.
QGIS is the more user friendly of the F/OSS GIS packages, but in general the difficulty is going to be getting shapefiles into L4D2. I'm not familiar with the map building tools in L4D2 but for most games they're probably pretty poor w/r/t actually using real world data.
Check out cartodb
It has free accounts, and has a lot of functionality.
You can use addresses, gps cordinates, and a few other methods to map areas. All you need is a csv file that is organized in a way that their software can read it, so definitely familiarize yourself with how they need it organized first.
If you need to convert addresses to coordinates, then check out this batch geocodeing site. It works pretty well, but can be a bit slow. This info should also be organized into columns then pasted in.
Goodluck
You could have a look at cartodb. You can host up to 50mb for free and create animations, etc.
Actually I just came across this. Worth a look!
Least for what I was thinking of, the agency information isn't necessary (but I could generate some interesting heat maps if you did). All I really need is the timestamp on the incident reports in the getgeo API. The name wasn't exactly concise and I didn't even look at it.
Check out http://cartodb.com if you feel like playing with that data.
Load your geojson into CartoDB (http://cartodb.com), then edit the data directly in the map (click any feature and then click the 'edit' button in the infowindow.
Finally, export your new geojson file with Options -> Export
You can do it in CartoDB and Odyssey.js. CartoDB is a dynamic data mapping tool, and Odyssey.js is just the open source library to create stories (and can use layers from CartoDB)
Generally yes but not at an enterprise level: http://cartodb.com/enterprise
But if you want to do it all in house the best place to start would be a PostGIS - GeoServer - Openlayers stack. This has been made user friendly in the OpenGeo Suit: http://boundlessgeo.com/solutions/opengeo-suite/
Guys, off beat request.
Can someone please interpret this heat map for me. I understand that it is checking for the countries from where tweet was made. But when I zoom in, I don't see any bubbles.
That is, how to make sense of this properly?
I know, I've. written application like this, re-read my response, I addressed this exact case. Specifically high resolution rendering of satellite imagery to user defined projections which can take more than an hour if the image is very large and the map server is handling multiple requests.
Edit: http://mapserver.org/ if you're wondering
That's just use Standard SQL select query with ogr2ogr and in the WHERE clause you put what field and then operators = or contains or having or like. Dialect SQLITE gives you even more options you can use all the Spatialite functions and do things like CAST or buffer or makepoint or intersect http://www.gaia-gis.it/gaia-sins/spatialite-sql-4.2.0.html https://gdal.org/user/sql_sqlite_dialect.html
TBH the data size quoted (1000s of polygons) doesn't sound all that hard for PostGIS to handle. At work we do on-the-fly pruning of the OpenStreetMap data to render custom maps. That's polygon/polygon intersections against ~100G of data, if it can manage that in 50-300ms it can manage lookup of their geofences.
Hell, there's even this, which would let you keep simple deployment/operations/scaling and still probably get similar performance "for free".
Ibycus is built on top of GeoGratis data. I have it loaded up in QLandekarte GT and it all transfers over to my little garmin etrex20 without any hassle.
Have you ever considered using the image processing capabilities of a somthing like GRASS GIS? another link more specific to image processing
Try GRASS, specifically the watershed stuff. I've used it to do exactly what you are describing, although I don't remember if it was r.watershed or another routine that did it. Poke around and you'll find it, anyway.
> Focal Statistics[1]
The equivalent tool in QGIS is r.neighbors, a Grass GIS function that is accessed via the Processing Toolbox (make sure the neighbourhood size is an odd number).
Off the top of my head, there's a really easy way to do this.
Take that particular shapefile you'd like to portray like this and convert to two different rasters.
The first raster has the raster values representing the value you'd like "stepped".
The second raster has the raster values represent the color. It would be best if they have the same "parcel" regions.
Then you can use NVIZ in GRASS to do the actual 3D display. http://grass.osgeo.org/grass64/manuals/nviz.html
Using the GRASS plugin for QGIS is probably the easiest way to use GRASS.
http://www.digital-geography.com/create-3d-visualizations-qgis-grass-and-nviz/
All opensource software ;p
Campaign Cartographer has addons with the 1st and 5th Annuals that are excellent for doing street and city mapping that look very googlesque and take a lot of the pain out of the work; that said, it's not cheap and the base software plus either pack will run about $80 ($120 for both annuals, not that both are necessary). Anyways, you may want to check out profantasy.com if you're not necessarily averse to spending cash.
There's also stuff like http://grass.osgeo.org/ which is free, but has a big learning curve and is probably overkill.
Here is the section of the GRASS wiki on georeferencing: http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/Georeferencing Here is a description of the Quantum GIS georeferencing plugin: http://www.megwrm.aun.edu.eg/sub/workshop1/georeferencing_with_quantum_gis.pdf
I haven't used these programs for georeferencing, but have for a variety of other functions. I use Quantum GIS with the GRASS plugins. It takes a bit of effort to relearn the functions when coming from ArcGIS, but I've found it to be generally full-featured with a large support community.
That aren't? There's a bunch of Database stuff which needs a bit of work, like index only scans, but it's pretty complete.
The admin tools are a little lacking which might make it a bit trickier to get started.
If you have any geo data I'd say postgreSQL is a must as postgis is awesome.
It has worked, when I have written the {{variable }} in a separate script and also the required function call like this
<script> var actions = {{ flaskactions }} getactions(actions)
function getactions(actions){ console.log(actions) alert("Worked") }
</script> <script src="http://www.openlayers.org/api/OpenLayers.js"></script> <script src="/static/mapscript.js"> </script> </body> </html>
But I want the var actions as the global parameters of mapscript.js.
This is my folder structure and I cannot change it due to requirements of flask.
Project ......templates .................index.html ......static .................mapscript.js
I have also tried this.
<script> var actions = {{ flaskactions }} localStorage.setItem("allactions", actions); </script>
In mapscript.js
var param = localStorage.getItem("allactions "); console.log(param)
BUT NO LUCK
I have tried as you said
This is my HTML code <div id='map'></div> <div id='graph'><img src="data:image/png;base64, {{ plot_url }}" style =" float:right ; padding-right: 60px; " alt="User Image" width="470" height="340"></div>
<script src="http://www.openlayers.org/api/OpenLayers.js"></script> <script src="/static/mapscript.js"> </script> <script> getactions({{ flaskactions }}); </script>
</body> </html>
The function to this is in <script src="/static/mapscript.js"> </script>
function getactions(param){ this.param = param; console.log(this.param) }
I am getting this error :
Uncaught ReferenceError: getactions is not defined
Ah, if you are digging through English resources you may find better results using "contour interval" instead. For your specific case, you may need to generate your own maps. A bit of time spent with QGIS and a few online tutorials may provide results if you don't have any luck elsewhere.
Wait are you learning to code? How'd you develop that app, if not?
I'm procrastinating about learning Java$cript but far more interested in using Python to program drones and to plot BFRO data into QGIS.
As for the pistol, everything dies if you hit the brain. Tzone targets are all I will train with.
I've been working with some map stuff. You could try the following:
There was one open source map application that did exactly what you wanted but I don't remember the name. I'll let you know if I find it.