[ckan-dev] Map-building "IDE"

Seb Bacon seb.bacon at okfn.org
Mon Apr 18 08:54:18 UTC 2011


Adrià, thanks for your Sunday essay -- it's really interesting :)

2011/4/17 Adrià Mercader <amercadero at gmail.com>:
> 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.

If you get a chance, I would be interested in the top-level background
on the pros and cons.  Of course, you can tell me to be less lazy and
find out for myself ;)

> 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.

And what are those limitations?

Thanks!

Seb




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