Cartography and USGS — Fake Building Footprints in PostGIS now with distance operator

In a previous post (I feel like I say that a lot), I wrote about rotating address points to match nearby roads in replicate the effect of USGS quads that represented small buildings with little squares that followed the nearby road alignment. The function was effective: but deadly slow when applied to all 500,000 address points. And so we iterate. First, I’ll show you our … Continue reading Cartography and USGS — Fake Building Footprints in PostGIS now with distance operator

PostGIS for Dessert: Sketching shapes in #PostGIS– compass roses revisited

For one of our applications, we need 8-point compass roses placed at each of our points, as well as a circle 40 meters in diameter as well as one 140 meters in diameter.  We did a bit of work with this a while back in GeoServer using SLDs.  Now we’d like to refine it, and implementing this in an SLD is beyond my skills. So, … Continue reading PostGIS for Dessert: Sketching shapes in #PostGIS– compass roses revisited

Building simple clients for MapFish — cURL as a client

I have two previous posts on using MapFish (in this case, the GeoServer version) to allow for printing to hi-resolution PDF maps from the browser.  Here we use a command-line browser (cURL) to post our json to the MapFish service in order to retrieve our PDF. I did not keep any notes from before on making json posts to the MapFish server as a means … Continue reading Building simple clients for MapFish — cURL as a client

Kicking the tires of PostGIS 2.0 — Testing ST_MakeValid

The feature in PostGIS 2.0 that excited me most was not topology support, raster support, or 3D functions.  Ok, raster was near the top of my list.  But what I was really excited by was the ST_MakeValid function.  Sad, isn’t it?  Lack of vision probably– excited to try to solve recurring technical snafus in a computationally inexpensive way, rather than being more excited by the … Continue reading Kicking the tires of PostGIS 2.0 — Testing ST_MakeValid

Cartography and USGS — Fake Building Footprints in PostGIS now with distance operator

Quick and fun post tonight.  Remember in USGS quads all the little building footprints that represented civilization?  We (me and my colleague John Stein) were contemplating how to pull off something similar with address points.  Here was our first attempt: It looks ok, but may be a little crude to be considered cartography (click on it to see it bigger– you’ll see those buildings don’t … Continue reading Cartography and USGS — Fake Building Footprints in PostGIS now with distance operator

Building simple clients for MapFish — Beginnings of a PL/pgSQL function

I’ve had a couple of other posts (1 and 2 and 3 and) on simple clients for MapFish.  I like the client server infrastructure for MapFish– with the client end of things built up in GeoExt, it makes for a really elegant combo.  But I’d like articulate my vision for simple clients for MapFish a little further.  One thing that seems quite feasible is to … Continue reading Building simple clients for MapFish — Beginnings of a PL/pgSQL function

Playing with new tools and old standards: GeoJSON, Leaflet, CartoDB across platforms

Leaflet, CartoDB, GeoJSON, and cross platform web map deployment. First some introductions: “Leaflet is a modern, lightweight open-source JavaScript library for interactive maps for desktop and mobile web browsers, developed by CloudMade to form the core of its next generation JavaScript API. Weighting just about 21kb of gzipped JS code, it still has all the features you will ever need for you web mapping needs … Continue reading Playing with new tools and old standards: GeoJSON, Leaflet, CartoDB across platforms

Building simple clients for MapFish — Underlying Infrastructure

In order to build simple clients for the MapFish print service, we have to understand what the protocols are that are invoked and how they function.  To do this we can read the MapFish Print Module Doc, and then modify and vamp from there.  While I was going to joke that this would be an excellent cure for insomnia, the joke fell apart when I … Continue reading Building simple clients for MapFish — Underlying Infrastructure