Mapping Hacks

Joshua Schachter’s GeoURL, one of the
original webpage geo-mapping sites, fell into spam and disuse about a year ago
(and was sadly only given brief mention in the book), but it’s now being given
new life by Ask Bjorn Hanson of CPAN fame. The website reports that its 2.0
launch will be “Real Soon Now”. It should be interesting […]

We’re pleased to announce that mappinghacks.com is hosting a tracker for
free sources of geodata available through BitTorrent. Supported by the
community, the tracker is already hosting torrents for VMap0, TIGER/Line 2004
FE, and SRTM 30, with more in the works. The UO Faculty of Cartography GeodataTorrents has links
to the available torrents. (There’s also a link to this […]

In yet another informative post to the MapServer users mailing list
(login required), Frank Warmerdam explains how to use the tiling and overview
features of GDAL’s GeoTIFF driver to get
optimal performance on large raster images in MapServer, QGIS, OpenEV, etc.:

Assuming your GeoTIFF input is in.tif, you would do something
like:

$ gdalwarp in.tif latlong.tif -t_srs WGS84 -co TILED=YES
$ gdaladdo […]

Via a post to the GDAL
mailing list, word comes to us that one Chris Soriano has figured out how
to use GDAL and Python to convert digital
elevation models (DEMs) into 3-D mesh data for use with Blender, an Open Source 3-D modelling
package. Although the book contains some POV-Ray
examples, my curiosity about Blender is now thoroughly piqued…

Our good friend Abhijit Menon-Sen has
compiled a pretty thorough guide to compositing your own LandSat-7
scenes from the raw spectral layers available from the Global Land Cover Facility. We used similar
techniques to make the composites used in our fly-over of Bilbao and as a
backdrop to the London Free
Map demo.
As an aside, if you don’t want to […]

David Blasby, the new maintainer of GeoServer, has had a pretty keen idea -
why, he reckons, shouldn’t all databases have spatial geometry
columns, operations, and indexes, rather than just the usual suspects, like
Oracle, PostgreSQL, and so on. He’s hacked a wrapper around the Java Topology
Suite (the precursor to Refractions’s excellent GEOS library, which PostGIS
uses) with libgcj, […]

Mapping Hacks contributor Mikel Maron
has produced a nice world gazetteer in Flash using worldKit, which makes
uses of our own geocoder.us to geocode
addresses in the United States.

We’ve been given permission by O’Reilly to distribute Jo’s “What To Do If
Your Government Is Hoarding Geodata” hack from the book under a Creative Commons
NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. We felt that it was important that this
bit of research on Jo’s part be freely available to anyone interested in
understanding the global state of geospatial data access policy - […]

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