Mapnik, the Cartography Engine of GIS, Goes 2.0

October 3, 2011 Leave a Comment

Mapnik 2.0 has been released:

The Mapnik team is pleased to announce that Mapnik 2.0 is finally here! We’ve jumped from 0.7 to 2.0, not because we got confused with our numbers, but to reflect that this release represents a big step forward for the project. We believe Mapnik 2.0 will provide a much more flexible and expressive platform for creating beautiful maps.

For details you can read the milestone list or change logs.  Unless you are under a rock, Mapnik is everywhere and used by everyone.  FOSS4G 2011 was dominated by two projects, Mapnik and PostGIS.  Good company if you ask me.

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The Guide to What Was Important at FOSS4G for People Who Didn’t Go to FOSS4G 2011

September 26, 2011 17 Comments

So FOSS4G has come and gone, in fact it came and went over a week ago. My day job kept me from posting about what happened last week, but the weekend always gives you time to write [ref]Especially while watching Arizona State demolish Southern Cal[/ref]. The near 1000 of us who attended saw all the great new initiatives around the open source geospatial community, but you probably didn’t. So here is what I see as where you should be looking in the next year before FOSS4G happens again.

  • Mapnik is King — It seems every session had at least some Mapnik component to it. Mapnik is becoming the cartography engine of GIS. I saw cartography during FOSS4G 2011 that just blew my socks off. Innovation in this space is moving so fast and Mapnik is the choice for anyone who is making beautiful, useful maps.
  • PostGIS — PostGIS 2.0 will come out early next year and you will have zero excuse to use any other spatial database. Much like Mapnik, most sessions had some sort of PostGIS component to them. If you don’t want to be left behind, get the book and start changing how you manage your location data.
  • Designers — One thing that has always been a knock against “traditional GIS” is that it is designed by scientists for scientists. Totally unusable for ordinary users. What I noticed at FOSS4G 2011 was how many companies are employing designers to make sure their apps and maps are usable for everyone. Vizzuality and Development Seed[ref]Tell me that Dev Seed’s homepage isn’t awesome, I dare you.[/ref] have jump to the lead of pushing design in front of classic geospatial front ends. Vizzuality’s CartoSet is giving users tools that they can easily design beautiful mapping applications with little or no coding. Development Seed’s MapBox suite makes it easy to leverage the powerful Mapnik engine to produce tile caches that work out of the box without any need of expensive servers software. Awesome stuff.
  • QGIS — At least in North America, QGIS is the desktop application of choice. I don’t recall seeing any gvSIG or uDIG[ref]Is uDig dead?[/ref] presentations, but QGIS was used by almost everyone. Over the last year it has morphed into a desktop GIS tool that is now my primary choice when working with GIS data. Combining QGIS with Mapnik gives me the ability to make beautiful cartography I cannot create anywhere else. It is completely liberating!
  • JavaScript not Flex/Silverlight — Yea, it isn’t much of a surprise, open source users aren’t big Flex or Silverlight users, but JavaScript HTML5 web apps are everywhere and doing everything Flex/Silverlight can do, but work everywhere[ref]When I refer to everywhere, I choose to ignore IE 6, 7, 8. If you’re stuck on those, find a new job[/ref]. At this point it is safe to call every Flex/Silverlight location app as legacy as nobody in their right mind would be coding with those tools in 2012.

FOSS4G 2011 was probably the best Geospatial/Location Conference I’ve been to. Paul Ramsey put it best when he said:

I told some folks at FOSS4G 2011 that I thought this year’s event was the “best FOSS4G ever” (HT, Juan Antonio Samaranch) but that wasn’t just tongue in cheek. 2011 was the biggest ever, but only a few attendees more than Barcelona in 2010. Yet somehow I felt more energized, more connected, like I had more conversations, than in 2010.

That was pretty much exactly how I felt. I was connect to the attendees, I was energized by the talks and left feeling like at least a portion of the geospatial community has a future in front of it. What is best about this community it is free to join. Just bring your experiences and get started.

The Tragic Prelude

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Friday Web Map Fun

February 18, 2011 6 Comments

So yea, Friday should be a good day to prepare yourself for the weekend.  To help ensure that I’ve got a couple interesting links to share.

  • TileMill – If you haven’t heard about TileMill yet, clearly you aren’t on the Internets.  One of the biggest issues with creating maps online is you usually either needed a bug bulky desktop application to style them, or you had to go all ninja on notepad.  Either way you end up hating yourself which is never good on a Friday.  TileMill leverages Carto for styling which uses CSS (CSS for map creation has been a huge goal of mine for years).  CSS to me is a natural way to style maps unlike AXL, SLD and MapFile.  All this cartography greatness is rendered with the awesome Mapnik.  Right now you need to stop how you are styling maps and move to TileMill, there is no other choice.  Look at the awesome people are already creating.
  • I’ve been called a Flex/Flash hater (Actually I’ve been called worse, but I can’t repeat it on the Internet), but clearly Flex is here to stay for web mapping.  We’ve seen some APIs from proprietary vendors, but if you want to roll in the open/free/beer crowd, you need to check out OpenScales.  Matt Sheehan has a good overview for open source developers that want to use open source for a web mapping front end, but not OpenLayers.
  • Lastly geographika ponders if HTML5 will change how we map raster graphics.  I embrace that new world and hope it gets here sooner than later.

Enjoy your Friday and weekend folks!

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Neo, Geo, GIS and Innovation

July 28, 2009 32 Comments

So every couple weeks, we get the neo is moving on up post.  My good friend Peter Batty wrote one titled, “How “neogeography” is rapidly moving into the “GIS” space“.

At several conferences I have attended recently – Where 2.0, WhereCamp and State of the Map (SOTM) – I have been struck by the amount of activity and innovation in areas that would have previously been regarded as firmly in the domain of “traditional GIS”. I’ll mention three: cartography, data creation and analysis.

So after reading his post, Peter and I shared some tweets back and forth and it became clear 140 characters is not enough.  Good thing I still blog.

So lets look at the basis of what Peter and many others are saying about “Neo”.  Peter is right in calling out Stamen Design as an innovator in our space (and many others).  But I disagree with his assessment that they are doing anything that is particularly neo.  What Stamen does is just incredible and really changes how web graphics are presented.  But I don’t think it really matters if they are Neo or not.  Their work stands on its own without having to put labels on it.  Oh sure they use OSM, Mapnik and many other Web 2.0 technologies, but that doesn’t make them Neo.  I also don’t buy the argument some make that if you are innovative, you must be neo.  Innovation is something that transcends a label.

Am I neo because I run Mapnik at the same time I’m paleo because I run ArcGIS Desktop?  Stamen, OSM and GeoCommons are all important because they innovate, not because they put a label on their shirts. In the end what is important is companies that innovate should be rewarded.  But I don’t think just because you use one piece of software or another should you be limited in your ability to take part in the revolution.

Peter’s underlying message is that you can be innovative without spending money tens of thousands of dollars.  That is a huge point to make about this “revolution”.  Being able to pick and choose platforms to develop on is a huge departure from the silos and stacks that we’ve been dealing with for years.  Heck, I wouldn’t have joined WeoGeo unless I didn’t believe things were changing for the better.

Viva La Revolución

Viva La Revolución

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Sharing Cartography

April 21, 2009 62 Comments

There are tons of ways to store spatial data, but sharing cartography is much harder. ESRI seems to be using their new Layer Package “format” to keep the ESRI layer file with the datasets. Outside of that I don’t really see much in the way for cartography support with data layers (other than the odd ESRI LYR file offered up on FTP sites). In a way, there is much to like about ESRI’s decision to use essentially a sidecar file for storing symbology and maybe there is a more open method of sharing this information.

Most of the time when you download data, you just get the raw file format (usually shapefiles). You then drag your new downloaded dataset to your viewer (possibly ArcView, maybe uDig) and then you proceed to try and figure out how to color the map up (of course there is no metadata so you can’t figure out what field you should symbolize on) in an attempt to match that PDF of a scanned map that someone gave you.  Wouldn’t it be better if there was included symbology that allowed you to view that data layer the way the author intended?

Well as I said, ESRI’s Layer Package format does this.  The Layer file is of course a problem because you need ArcObjects to read it.  But in an ESRI world, that isn’t too much of a problem.  Outside of an ESRI world, maybe the MapServer Mapfile might be the best way to get symbology information in (heck you can write out a Mapfile from ESRI, let alone all those open source clients).  Some have said KML is that format.  I disagree because it doesn’t lend itself to storing attribute information (maybe there are ways, but I still question if KML should be used this way).  At least KML does store simple symbology with the dataset.

Ron Lake offers up SLD/SE as an option, but acknowleges that it really has no traction.  I really haven’t seen SLD used much beyond some GeoServer documentation and I’ve not seen anyone try and use SLD for storing cartography in desktop clients (NOTE: According to comments uDig does support SLD, but not be default which is a good starting point).  Sean Gillies thinks CSS is the best option but again we run into the issues of desktop clients not supporting it and probably won’t (though Sean gets GeoMonkey cred for continuing to use the term “GeoWeb” every chance he gets).

What about Mapnik?  It does a superb job at rendering great maps and Andrew Turner says there is a project that can convert CSS into Mapnik.  Now that might be a workflow.  CSS is very easy to edit and and work with and  Mapnik is great at rendering cartography (and could easily be supported by desktop clients).  CSS gets stored as a sidecar file to the dataset and the rich cartography can be read with Mapnik to render the maps as the author wishes the maps to look.  Maybe Sean is on to something after all…

If we are going to go out on the GeoWeb wall of death, well need a sidecar.

If we are going to go out on the GeoWeb wall of death, we'll need a sidecar.

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