Alan McConchie almccon

Basemaps

Or baemaps if you're typing too quickly

First question:

How much work do you want to do

All teh works
Then desktop GIS is for you! Go ahead and find every single background layer you could ever think of and download it! Parks, roads, cemeteries, buildings, streams, water bodies, railroads, wetlands, parking lots, forests, farms...
Now load them all up in your desktop GIS of choice (who are we kidding. It's ArcGIS). Style away! Don't forget to think about scale ranges. So style each thing for each scale range!
Not keen on GUIs? Then grab an old dusty copy of Tilemill, load up each of your layers per usual, and then start writing CartoCSS. It's fun!

In case anyone is interested, I've been trying to use turf.js on both Mapbox and Mapzen vector tiles, and I've learned a few things I wish I'd known going in.

Background

This thing I've been working on for a month or so here and there, to make maps like this:

Purpose

Cartographic Design Resources

by Chris Henrick

Tools

Color Brewer: Tool created by Cynthia Brewer that offers advice for using color on maps, specifically with thematic mapping. Lets you export color schemes to various formats.
Mapshaper for generalizing your geospatial data which helps your maps not only look better but load faster. Mapshaper let's you preview how generalized it looks before you export it.

Guides & Tutorials

Nathaniel Kelso's Geo How To wiki though now a little out dated still has lots of great info in it.

This Python script utilizes the GeoPy geocoding library to batch geocode a number of addresses, using various services until a pair of latitude/longitude values are returned.

https://gist.github.com/rgdonohue/c4beedd3ca47d29aef01

TileMill in bash + AppleScript

Installation (OS X)

In the project directory:

npm install tessera tilelive-mapnik tilelive-carto
brew install fswatch

##How to get started contributing to a Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team task

###Overview

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is an open-source map of the world that anyone can edit. But like any map, it's incomplete.

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT) helps organize people to improve the OSM map for crisis areas, mostly so aid workers can find their way around and make decisions about undermapped places. The data in these crisis areas is often very poor, or completely non-existent. Therefore any contribution you make at all will be a vast improvement, and could materially help people who are on the ground right now, looking at this data as you edit it, and deciding where to go and who to help.

There are many HOT tasks active at once. As of August 2014, the highest-priority tasks are Gaza and areas affected by the West African Ebola outbreak.

Processing LiDAR to extract building heights

Walk through

Detailed walk through of building extraction using postgis

First lets pull a data layer from of openstreetmap. You can do this any which way you’d like, as there are a variety of methods for pulling openstreetmap data from their database. Check the [wiki] (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Downloading_data) for a comprehensive list. My favourite method thus far is pulling the data straight into QGIS using the open layers plugin. For those who may want to explore this method, check [this tutorial] (http://www.qgistutorials.com/en/docs/downloading_osm_data.html). For building extraction you only need building footprints, and include the building tags. Not all polygons are of type building in OSM, so we can download all the polygons, and then filter the layer for only polygons tagged as buildings.

LiDAR data was pulled from USGS via the Earth Explorer site. [Here] (http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/blogs/ele

This is my default career advice for people starting out in geo/GIS, especially remote sensing, adapted from a response to a letter in 2013.

I'm currently about to start a Geography degree at the University of [Redacted] at [Redacted] with a focus in GIS, and I've been finding that I have an interest in working with imagery. Obviously I should take Remote Sensing and other similar classes, but I'm the type of person who likes to self learn as well. So my question is this: What recommendations would you give to a student who is interested in working with imagery? Are there any self study paths that you could recommend?

I learned on my own and on the job, and there are a lot of important topics in GIS that I don’t know anything about, so I can’t give comprehensive advice. I haven’t arrived anywhere; I’m just ten minutes ahead in the convoy we’re both in. Take these recommendations critically.

Find interesting people. You’ll learn a lot more from a great professor (or mentor, or friend, or conference) o

This is a non-technical reading list for technical people.

How to Program Independent Games
Kill Math (and Don't Kill Math)
Move Fast and Don't Break Things
Launch & The Web Is a Customer Service Medium by Paul Ford
_why at Art & Code
Repetitive Process

This is a list of software you should read like a novel.

	states = fl la nc ok va \
	al ga ma nd or vt \
	ar hi md ne pa wa \
	az ia me nh ri wi \
	ca id mi nj sc wv \
	co il mn nm sd wy \
	ct in mo nv tn \
	dc ks ms ny tx \
	de ky mt oh ut