shakythesherpa / geo-how-to

commands, notes for open-source geo workflows

Getting started

• Software - Install critical software and links to tutorials.

• Data - Download OSM and Natural Earth data.

• Example workflow - Start a project, import data, export data, create tiles.

• Web mapping = API + tiles - Slippy maps on the web have two parts: images tiles that make up the map, and an API framework that stitches tiles together and handles interactive panning and zooming.

• Why go open source geo - Read what the community is saying.

• Map examples - Pretty basemap tiles and compelling interactive maps.

Mapping

• PostGIS - Store your geography in a spatial database (kinda the open source version of an Esri GeoDB). Faster than raw SHP files when speed matters. Storage default for OSM data.

• OGR, GDAL - Reproject, sort, filter and otherwise modify Shapefiles and other vector map data formats. GDAL for raster. These are amazingly powerful.

• QGIS - The open source alternative to ArcMap, but not as industrial strength. It's a GUI for composing maps and doing simple analysis.

• Map Styling - Cascadenik, carto since raw Mapnik XML is hellish.

• Style Hub - Pre-baked stylesheets for drawing OSM and Natural Earth data.

• TileStache - Cache web map tiles, from Stamen.

• Dymo - Create beautiful map labels, from Stamen.

• Geocoding - This is the one hard part about going open source geo.

• Routing - tk tk tk

• Shapely - Python library for geometric objects, predicates, and operations without requiring PostGIS.

• Tiles - Once you're done designing your map, you'll have 10s of thousands of tiny image files, hundreds and thousands of megabytes in size. You'll need to post these online.

• Map scales/zooms, coordinate systems - Web maps have 20 preset scales, learn these “zoom” levels and their natural scale equivelents.

• [Generalize your data](https://github.com/nvkelso/geo-how-to/wiki/Generalize your data) - Seriously. Your maps will look better and load faster.

• GeoJSON - Make it smaller. Giving your data the precision it's accuracy deserves.

• MaPublisher - Make maps in Adobe Illustrator.

Unix command line

• Makefiles - Key to organizing your workflow and making it repeatable.

• Python - tk tk tk

• General Unix commands

• Download onto server using CURL

• File permissions

• GREP - Data formatting problems? Advanced text find-replace to the rescue.

• SSH keys

• ZIP on the server

Project management:

• Git aka Github

• SVN aka Subversion

Other

• Markdown is the devil - Yet another random raw text formatting style without a GUI.