Maps etc.
Mapping |
GPS |
Maps & images of Earth |
Map applications & services |
Astronomy |
Oceanography |
Travel |
Concept mapping
- OpenStreetMap - an
open-source project that
‘creates and provides free geographic data such as street maps
to anyone who wants them’. The Web sites are rather confusing
because there are a number of related projects, a number of ways
of accessing the maps, a number of different map renderings, and
a number of ways to edit and export the maps, and the relationships
of all these bits are not always well explained for newcomers.
- The home page provides access to the map for
viewing, editing and exporting, and permits uploading
and management of GPS traces.
- OpenStreetMap wiki
provides documentation, including a discussion of the various
contact channels for help and discussion.
The newbies e-mail list
(a general users’ help list) was terminated in 2016 Jan
in favour of
help.openstreetmap.org.
- Switch2OSM.org
explains how to use OSM to put maps on Web sites,
‘from first principles to technical how-tos’.
- OSM Inspector
‘created as a more or less general tool to show different views of OSM data
in order to help advanced OSM users debug the data.’
Among other things, it provides access to detailed histories of individual
nodes and ways.
-
The Information Freeway offers a number of alternative
base layers and an optional Maplint overlay;
I haven’t found any documentation and it’s not clear
what the different layers do.
At zoom = 6 and 12, individual tiles are outlined;
it used to support the typing of
‘r’ to render and ‘i’ for status information but these
no longer work since Tiles@Home was decommissioned.
- Printing maps
from OSM:
- Field Papers
(a continuation of Walking Papers)
- MapOSMatic
renders city maps on demand, for printing on
large paper or in sets of regular-size paper,
with street indexes.
(One sequence for printing: use
PDFsam
to remove p. 2
(which is intentionally blank) so the maps themselves
start on an odd-numbered page, and then print selected pages
two-up and two-sided-short-edge)
- and others
- Stephan Bösch-Plepelits’
OpenStreetBrowser
‘is an application to ‘browse’ through the information in
the displayed part of the map. The aim of the project is
to provide a highly dynamic map that makes every mapped feature
easily available to the user.’
As of 2018 Aug there is a very nice rendition of public transit.
-
OpenCycleMap is based on OSM; it also uses
NASA’s SRTM topographic data for height contours
(ref)
-
OpenPisteMap, also based on OSM, shows a map of
skiing and snowboarding pistes.
- Pic4Carto
displays a grid showing how many open-licensed street-level photos
it has found on the Web for each grid square,
and includes a photo viewer.
- OpenStreetCam
(1,
2)
- One can also create customized maps and embed them in a Web site
(see switch2osm.org).
For example:
See
RobJN’s post about geojson.io and uMap and his
post about extracting data from OSM using
Overpass turbo.
See also this trick for replacing one of the OSM
layers by custom tiles.
- GeoJSON
‘is a format for encoding a variety of
geographic data structures’.
GeoJSINLint is a site
for validating GeoJSON data - the data are interpreted and
displayed on a map, and errors are reported.
- Maperitive is a
zero-cost (not open-source) desktop application that
loads map data and permits the user to modify the rendering
rules and export the results as bitmap or SVG files.
- OpenLayers is
‘a pure JavaScript library for displaying map data
in most modern web browsers,
with no server-side dependencies’,
used for displaying OSM maps.
See, for example,
Getting Started,
Using Custom Tile Sources and
documentation of the OpenLayers object.
See also this old (2008/2009)
discussion of alternatives,
especially for non-mapping applications.
- FOSM is a fork of OSM
resulting from OSM’s change to a
new licence.
- Natural Earth
provides public-domain map data with tightly integrated vector
and raster data at 1:10M, 1:50M AND 1:110M scales.
- Other mapping projects:
WikiMapia,
MapOMatix,
Tagzania,
GlobeFeed.com
-
LOCOSYS Genie GT-31/BGT-31 is a neat handheld GPS device.
OpenStreetMap had a
special deal with the UK distributor whereby
10% of the price was donated to the project;
the Canadian distributor was
Mobile GPS Online.
There used to be some useful tips at mtbest.net; the following
are links to web.archive.org for 2009:
Setting up Navi GT31 for speed sailing
and
Using Navi GT11/GT31 gps inside Aquapack.
- Garmin (because an old nuvi 260 was given to us):
product support page;
free maps for Garmin
based on OpenStreetMap;
Mkgmap tool
for making maps for Garmin.
- MyTourBook
is an open-source programme to visualize and analyze tours
which are recorded by
a GPS device, a bike or exercise computer, or an ergometer.
Among many other features, it displays the tours (tracks) over
maps from a number of different sources, and can display
speed, altitude and
gradient profiles against either time or distance.
For Linux, Mac and MS Windows.
-
GPX Editor
by Pixel_K is an open-source graphical editor for GPX files. It displays
tracks over Google maps or OpenStreetMap maps
(including the cyling and piste versions), and altitude profiles.
GPL licence. For MS Windows only.
Version 1.7.9-beta (2018 Sep 12) has some important improvements
compared with version 1.6.21 (2018 Apr 25),
which is the ‘latest download’ as of 2019 Jan 3.
It is convenient for cutting GPX tracks into
pieces for subsequent analysis by MyTourBook.
See here
for a list of such editors.
- GPSBabel
is an open-source application for converting among a large number
of file formats. GPL licence.
For Linux (distributed as source), Mac and MS Windows.
It is convenient for converting the GT31’s
.sbp files
to GPX, for subsequent use by GPX Editor.
-
Terrain Tiles
Open Data on AWS. Gridded elevation tiles.
Documentation by Mapzen, which itself is no longer active.
Data are served in several
formats: PNG images (terrarium format for
elevations, or normal for surface normals), GeoTIFF and Skadi.
Desired coordinates and zoom levels can be obtained using the
maptiler.org Tiles tool; use the Google x and y values.
For example,
https://s3.amazonaws.com/elevation-tiles-prod/terrarium/12/1210/1465.png
obtains the PNG image shown on the right, zoom level = 12,
x=1210, y=1465. The elevation at each pixel in the image is encoded as
(red * 256 + green + blue / 256) - 32768
- Natural Resources Canada offers many
geomatics resources and tools, including (among other things)
- Atlas of Canada,
including interactive maps,
Toporama Mapping Tool,
reference maps, map archives, past editions, etc.
- Topographic Information
includes a variety of
‘maps, data, applications and tools’, including
Toporama Interactive Map,
Geospatial Data Extraction,
etc.
-
Canadian Geographical Names
-
Géoboutique Québec sells a variety of products;
paper maps and aerial photos are sold through authorized dealers
- Digital map collection of
Bibliothèque et Archives national
du Québec - examples showing
Notre Dame de Grâce:
See also photographs:
-
Interactive map of Montréal
(divided into boroughs; base maps include roads, buildings, aerial
photos and combined; layers include zoning and many other things)
- Public trees of Montreal
(as of 2023 Jun 1, doesn’t work with Firefox)
-
Maps of Montréal
(Navigateur urbain
includes aerial photos from 2002; uses Java)
(as of 2023 Jun 1, don’t work)
- Maps of Montréal
(as of 2023 Jun 1, doesn’t work)
-
Maps of Laval
(includes aerial photographs at the largest scales)
-
Maps of Sherbrooke (PDF)
-
Maps & Atlas of Ottawa including
interactive eMap with selectable layers and aerial photos from 2002
(also a set of 1999 aerial photos)
- Canadian
Postal
Codes
-
Map collection at Perry-Castañeda Library (University
of Texas)
- Links from
Satellite imagery for everyone:
USGS Landsat,
NASA MODIS,
ESA Copernicus.
- Zoom Earth
`‘shows near real-time satellite images and the best high-resolution views
in a fast, zoomable map’, together with storm tracks and predictions
- NASA’s Gateway
to Astronaut Photography of Earth and selected
Earth from Space
images (includes images of Montréal in winter)
- GLOBE
(Global Land One-km Base Elevation Project) has free topographic
data for the world with roughly 1-km resolution; for combined
land+ocean coverage see
2-minute colour relief images
(land topography is down-sampled GLOBE data)
- U.S. Geological Survey, incl.
National Map,
Geographic Names Information System
- Google Earth is a client
running locally, for Mac & Microsoft Windows, which includes
elevation data, the ability to add markers, etc. Notes:
- Snippets: In the displayed list of ,
for each item there may be displayed one or two lines of text, which
represents either the beginning of the
Description of
the item, if any, or text defined in a Snippet XML element
in myplaces.kml. It doesn’t seem to be possible to
suppress the display of this text using the GUI. To suppress it, edit
myplaces.kml
(in ~\AppData\LocalLow\Google\GoogleEarth\)
with a text editor:
(1) If the text is defined explicitly in a Snippet
element and there is no text in a Description element,
delete the Snippet element.
(2) If there is some text in a Description element,
then define an empty Snippet element
(<Snippet/> or
<Snippet></Snippet> or even
<Snippet maxLines="0"></Snippet>).
I thought that it might also be possible to suppress the text
display globally by changing the default
<maxSnippetLines>2</maxSnippetLines>
in the ListStyle element of the
My Places folder, but it didn’t seem to work.
- By default, usage statistics are sent to Google. This can be
suppressed in
under the tab.
- Google Maps
- Mapquest mapping service
(examples 1,
2,
3)
(Tripquest
also links to Mapquest)
- multimap.com - maps and
aerial photos (based in UK)
- The USGS Store provides free
1:24 000 scanned topographic maps of the U.S.A.,
among other things that are mostly not free
- Sky and Telescope magazine
- John Walker’s Your Sky
includes Web-based whole-sky maps, horizon views, a Virtual Telescope,
etc., plus some downloadable software (mostly for Windows)
- skymaps.com includes monthly
evening star charts in PDF format
- Surface-map images for
the solar system and the stars, from NASA/JPL/Caltech
- NASA’s
sunspots, including daily images and a movie generator
- Time and Date AS (Norway)
-
Venus, including
phases, etc.
- Akkana Peck’s JavaScript app showing the positions of
Jupiter’s
4 Galilean moons
- International Space Station
visibility data
for Montréal
- NOAA
aurora forecasts (lead time 30–90 minutes)
-
Light pollution map of the world, interactive using OpenStreetMap
- NASA’s
StarChild (‘A Learning Center for Young Astronomers’,
ages 5–13) and
Imagine the Universe!
(ages 14+)
- CDS
(Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg)
- ADC
(Astronomical Data Center, NASA)
See list of software.
- Concept maps
- Topic maps
- ‘topic maps are concept maps that got finished’
(Park, 2002)
- includes topics, associations (as hypergraph) and
occurrences (information resources)
-
ISO standard
- Onotoa
(multi-platform, free, closed source[?], based on Eclipse).
As of 2018 Mar 24, latest version is 1.1.0 dated 2009 Aug 23.
A version 1.1.1 was apparently included in the 2011 Feb
issue of Eclipse Magazin (German), and
version 1.2 was said to be coming ‘very soon’
(ref).
- Mind maps
- hierarchical, radial (structurally if not visually)
like a concept map but organized around a central concept
(ref)
- FreeMind
R. Funnell
Last modified: 2025-02-12 08:06:45
