This week has been mostly about web-mapping
Posted December 5, 2008 
Comments(9)
Comments(9) I started off this week with the intention of resurrecting and upgrading a demo openlayers map of all our sites, that had been stuck in a sorry corner of our corporate website being neglected. This tied in with moving the map to a different server, upgrading all the components, and generally giving it a shave and a haircut (it is male, that’s for certain). For those people interested in our wms and wfs data- these will be online again soon, I promise.
While I now have a site up again, pretty much ready to go bar the shouting, I’ve had an interesting time playing with some new toys in the process, so here’s a quick run-down:
- Mapfish and GeoadminSuite: A funky framework for widgetising openlayers. Geoadminsuite connects mapserver, openlayers and mapfish to manage data and create really nice mapfish applications. Way cool. Progress so far- it’s all up and running, though GeoadminSuite had teething troubles that have hopefully been sorted in the latest svn release.
- Openlayers: OK, so I’m just catching up with the latest release after ducking out for a while to do “real work”, but I have to say I like the new(er) features. It was nice to be able to do popups without needing to re-write the code for every version of every flavour of browser. That’s not openlayers’ fault of course, just issues with “standards” for things like DOM, which I don’t claim to understand.
- Openstreetmap WMS data from Wheregroup: Comes in free and paid-for flavours though details on pricing and terms of service for the commercial version were sketchy on a first skim of the website. This could be really handy to use as background mapping data for web maps, although there are issues of completeness (as always) and it probably needs running through our own mapserver to sort out the styling. This is definitely a goer- I just need to figure out which of the 50 or so layers they publish are really necessary and at what scale. And some kind of completeness metric, so we know how reliable the data is for a given area…
- Openstreetmap shapefiles from Cloudmade: A reduced dataset for the UK, with less layers. This might be a better option for us to use as we can control the styling better at the source. As a cheat, I’m going to load it all up in Quantum GIS, style it there, and use the mapserver export plugin to quickly build my map file.
- Mapnik: One of my colleagues would very much like us to create our own openstreetmap wms server, and use mapnik. I’d love to, as the cartography is really good, but after diving into it today, I have to say I think I need some hand holding before I can actually make it serve maps. We’ll see…
Also rans:
- Ordnance Survey have changed the licensing for their OpenSpace product: You still need a license to use their data, but you can download the development kit from sourceforge. The license has also been changed to have more “clarity” in terms of the ownership of derived data. It would be churlish to suggest that this has anything to do with the “Show Us a Better Way” mess up, wouldn’t it? The problem is, you still need to pay for the background data, so we’re back up to points 2 and 3 above…
- Amazon launches public datasets: This, in my limited experience, seems to be a duplication of ideas that are already out there. That’s fine when it’s software, and you want to stomp all over your rivals, but wouldn’t it have been nice for them to give their support to an existing data repository?
Things to play with next:
- Openaerialmap: Also has a wms service…
here’s mapserver rendering osm data: http://mapserverosm.s3.amazonaws.com/parisosm.html
(osm dump loaded into postgis with osm2pgsql)
mapfile available shortly, as it requires a few patches to mapserver, scheduled in rfc49.
cheers,
tb
I am really excited about MapServer’s rfc49.
Until then you can find some hand holding for mapnik at:
http://code.google.com/p/mapnik-utils/
I’d first try to render at sample tile with nik2img.py.
Then one simple way to serve mapnik rendered tiles for the web is to use TileCache with type=mapnik and then just point TileCache at your mapnik xml mapfile.
An emerging and very cool option is to style your OSM data using the pre-processor called Cascadenik, also found at: http://code.google.com/p/mapnik-utils/
[...] :] Blog ArcheoGeek Partagez et profitez [...]
Hi Thomas et al,
Thanks for this- in the end I found a nice example for openlayers implementing the openstreetmap (mapnik) tiled map service (or whatever TMS) stands for. For getting a map online, that will do me, but I love the mapnik rendering so will work on getting that set up for our own use.
Thanks for stopping by!
Jo
Are there any existing free stylesheets for OSM data e.g. in SLD format? I’ve just downloaded the UK OSM shapefile data from CloudMade (thanks for the tip, by the way), so a corresponding stylesheet would be handy. Or am I missing some obvious alternative approach?
Hi Chris,
I don’t know if such a thing exists on the openstreetmap site, certainly the data that I have seen from the wheregroup’s wms is styled very differently to other osm data that I’ve seen. It would be very handy though!
Jo
Hello Jo,
I will try to learn more about renderers, to be fair I am quite interested in system architecture around medium to large web mapping websites… the interaction between the database, the renderer, the portal itself, the eventual caching systems, is something I find very interesting
BTW, it seems that chris finally got the planet working on blogs.thehumanjourney.net , so you are aggregated now!
Hey Yann,
Welcome! (and welcome to people reading via the new aggregator).
Yes, I think we can scale up the web mapping by looking at things like mapnik, and tuning the servers (mod_deflate, for example), and the databases etc. Good fun…
Let me get my map back up first though!
Jo
[...] have also had a great week exploring mapfish and openlayers, as I discussed a couple of weeks ago. It’s been great fun (in an intellectually challenging sort of way) [...]