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20 Mar 2007

Mapping your own free data

Published in Geo  |  3 Comments

Christopher Schmidt has put up an excellent screencast on Mapping Your Data where he walks through getting free data from the CIA world fact book, and carrying you through to generating web-based ’slippy’ map in OpenLayers. Along the way he uses the powerfuli,f somewhat cryptic, QGIS and the very difficult, but even more powerful WMS.

It’s a great tutorial, an very short owing to the power and ease of use open tools have developed into. Open tools can now begin to accomplish real GIS work instead of being solely for the StoryMapper or Neogeographer.

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  1. Tim says:

    March 20th, 2007 at 4:49 pm (#)

    Hi

    As a QGIS worker bee I’d love to hear what makes it ‘cryptic’ … we are always looking to improve things for our end users….

    Regards

    Tim

  2. Allan Doyle says:

    March 21st, 2007 at 8:16 am (#)

    Tim – QGIS is cryptic to neogeographers who don’t have any GIS background. I think QGIS is great for as much as I have figured out to do with it, but in the days of (1) launch app, (2) be productive in a few minutes without reading any manual the usability bar is set pretty high.

    In other words, it’s not really QGIS, it’s the users… and that means a whole lot of work for user interface designers everywhere.

    I think being able to drag & drop a shapefile or other data source onto a running QGIS would go a long way towards de-cryptification.

  3. Andrew says:

    March 27th, 2007 at 4:13 pm (#)

    My bad – as Allan points out, this is more PEBKAC (Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair), but I’m a huge proponent of simple to use interfaces to get up and running. Perhaps that’s why I use a Mac.

    Let me dig into QGIS more and get back with specific notes to you.

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