To create a standard base map that anyone can contribute to and benefit from, the TomTom Maps Platform is bringing together a pool of map content from map users around the world. The resulting geolocation database – the largest available today – feeds continuous improvements back to the map, helping it keep up with reality.
The pool is filled with an array of sources, including OpenStreetMap, sensor-derived observations (SDO) from millions of vehicles, probe data and shared points of interest (POI). It’s a dizzying amount of data that we quickly make sense of, validate and act on.
There’s a marketing page and a video featuring dramatic music and Steve Coast saying very little: “Maps are used way more than people think but it’s invisible to us. As things get quicker, we have to change the way we think about maps.”
Is this new product primarily OpenStreetMap data and some additional data sprinkled on top? Does it have an API? Map tiles? An SDK? It’s hard to tell as the material was written by marketing people for people in suits.
We will have to wait for further announcements to understand what TomTom’s new map platform can do.
A design proposal for the modularization of the map rendering architecture can be found at #547. This modularization will allow new rendering architectures to be implemented quickly and more easily, and we anticipate that the modularization will give us a concrete framework to better interrogate various migration strategies.
I love this approach, gathering feedback from the community before starting the work to make actual changes to the code and architecture.
The program from this year’s Pacific Geospatial Conference in Fiji has been released. The focus of the 2022 editing is less on technology but on applications to problems specific to the Pacific region. For a pleasant change, the list of presenters doesn’t include the usual suspects from the industry.
NACIS, the North American Cartographic Information Society, have uploaded recordings of this year’s annual meeting in Minneapolis. The playlist contains over 100 videos covering all sessions from the meeting.
Greg Miller, writing for Wired Magazine, in a portrait of Cynthia Brewer, of Colorbrewer fame:
Brewer’s influence on cartography is far-ranging. Others have imitated her approach, developing a TypeBrewer and a Map Symbol Brewer. She’s seen her color schemes in everything from financial charts to brain imaging studies.
It’s a portrait in one of the most renowned technology publications of a university professor working on a rather niche subject — goes to show how much influence Brewer’s work has on our craft.
The fine folks at Crunchy Data have lined up a great set of talks for a one-day conference celebrating this year’s PostGIS day on 17 November. It’s an online event, with sessions scheduled for over twelve hours; wherever you in the world and whenever you’re awake that day, you can drop in at any time. The event is free and registration is now open.
Workflows, a new workflow builder introduced by Carto, allows people to build geo-data-processing workflows without writing code. It simplifies the creation of nested SQL queries. It provides means to import data from an external service or send the processing result via email.
The full extent of capabilities is pretty sparse at the moment. Workflows is currently in private beta; the public beta will be released in the “coming weeks.”
Christopher Beddow reported it first (at least in my timeline); the small-scale GeoJSON editor Geojson.io received an update after development had lied dormant for a while.
There are no recent releases, the changelog hasn’t been updated in over four years, and the Mapbox blog is quiet on the topic. It’s hard to precisely summarise what has changed. But based on my memory of the feature set before the update, newly added features include the following:
Project the data using Mapbox’s recently released globe projection.
New base maps, including Outdoors, Light, and Dark styles.
Load XYZ tile layers from external sources.
Create a set of points, ideal if you want to quickly create an artificial dataset for testing.
Enhance existing geometries by automatically adding bounding boxes to each feature.
Import data from text and binary formats, including:
Encoded polylines
Well-know Binary (WKB)
Well-known Text (WKT)
Update: Chris Whong pointed out on Twitter that most of the functionality outlined above was already existing prior to last week’s update. Chris has also updated the changelog. I missed a couple of new features, including:
The underlying mapping library was upgraded to MapboxGL, which enables the globe projection.
Automatic formatting of GeoJSON when pasted.
Code-folding, ideal for working with long GeoJSON documents.