[ckan-dev] Map-building "IDE"

Sun Apr 17 16:43:37 UTC 2011

As you will have gathered, TileMill is a studio for styling and
creating tile sets.
It's a brilliant piece of software and one of the best existing
examples of what has been called "neo-geography" as opposed to
"paleo-geography". The neo vs paleo (or as I much prefer geohipsters
vs paleotards) has been the hot debate in the spatial world for the
last years. Everything in TileMill summarizes the philosophy of the
neogeos: Use tiling to maximize speed on web apps, Output projection
limited to Web Mercator (you can used different projections as input),
Styling through Carto (a CSS-like map styling language), etc even the
technology used, node.js and mapnik. On the other side of the spectrum
we find the INSPIRE world, with OGC based services and architecture,
the very definition of paleogeography.
As usual, I think both philosophies have high and lows and both fit
well in different scenarios.

Regarding how to use the spatial libraries around for our needs, the
good news is that there are a lot of excel·lent Python spatial
libraries and frameworks around.
Mapnik [1] is used to create maps and is definitely having a lot of
momentum right now. Shapely [2] is used to perform spatial analysis,
which can also be performed with GeoAlchemy [3] + a spatial DB like
PostGIS (Or with GeoDjango [4], which is also really popular and with
some modules loosely coupled with django), Higher level frameworks
like MapFish [5] (built on Pylons) make really easy to create REST
spatial services. And of course there are also owslib (which we
already use), geojson, the ogr bindings...
Not sure on how OSM could be used though. I like Nominatim [6], the
OSM geocoder and reverse-geocoder that does not have the limitations
of the Google one.

Well, that looks like a proper Sunday afternoon essay! Do not hesitate
to ask me any particular detail.

Adrià

[1] http://mapnik.org/
[2] http://trac.gispython.org/lab/wiki/Shapely
[3] http://www.geoalchemy.org/
[4] http://geodjango.org/
[5] http://mapfish.org
[6] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim

2011/4/16 David Read <david.read at okfn.org>:
> I've been wondering if OSM, Mapnik etc. could be harnessed for our
> Geodata plans. And this tool which builds on Mapnik seems to do lots
> of wonderful integration and I like the styling.
>
> However, I'm quite surprised that it seems limited to the Web Mercator
> projection, and I think INSPIRE specifies a different one. I'm sure
> they have their reasons. No doubt Adria has a better understanding of
> it all and can guide us on whether we can take advantage of TileMill
> or indeed OSM, Mapnik etc.
>
> David
>
> On 16 April 2011 09:17, Seb Bacon <seb.bacon at okfn.org> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Could be of interest in plans to visualise geodata:
>>
>>  http://developmentseed.org/blog/2011/feb/16/announcing-tilemill-modern-map-design-studio-powered-open-source
>>
>> Seb
>>
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>
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