I have to create a fictional map as a visual representation for a particular community in a video game that I would not disclose.
The map would have multiple landmarks that requires to be drawn a radius around it, creating a circle. This circle should change in color depending on certain events that occurred, often monthly.
The reason why it is in Google Sheets was the data that is being collected from the game is needed to be calculated and graphed alongside the said interactive map.
I can confidently say that no one have perform this sort of thing with Google Sheets before.
My skills are essentially beginner-level, so if there are some topics that are outside the scope of general amateur skillset, please describe it for me.
I first thought that I could simply overlap images together, but images in Google Sheets can't change it's position in the sheets through the app-script, like placing it in a coordinate system. Because there are many landmarks that are needed to be drawn a circle around with multiple different kinds of color existing in the palette, it's not exactly a good idea to have all possible combination of different landmarks or color of the circle and then display one correct one out of hundreds of possibility.
Changing the color can be manually be dealt by hand, as monthly changes are not difficult to perform.
If there are other more suitable program for this job, please let me know!
What you have is GIS data (see GIS community at Stack Exchange), and you need to visualize it.
I don’t know what kind of raw data you have but you can probably load it directly to a GIS program like QGIS (link to site) to visualize it, or even do things like heat maps or aggregations without need of programming.
If it doesn’t have an specific functionality that you need and there’s no plugin that does so, you can also make a content service (see documentation on how to do so) that returns a GeoJSON with points on the landmarks with the computed data as extra information. Then I’d use the program to visualize it. This obviously requires programming.
If for some reason you cannot install a program, you could also make a WebApp (see documentation on how to do so) and use a GIS library (Leaflet, for example) to make a visualizate of the data. In this case the data would be fetched via google.script.run. This requires even more programming.
References
Content Service (Google Developers)
HTML Service: Create and Serve HTML (Google Developers)
google.script.run (Google Developers)
QGIS webpage
Leaflet webpage
Related
It seems most Bokeh embedding examples are using bokeh.plotting.figure object. Is it possible to embed a high level chart, like bokeh.charts.Bar or bokeh.charts.Scatter? Or is it possible to have convert a high level chart to a bokeh.plotting.figure object?
Thanks a lot.
The User's Guide section on Bokeh APIs has a good run down of how all these parts fit together, that I would suggest reading.
The long-story-short: Regardless of what API you use, bokeh.plotting or bokeh.charts, the end result is always just a collection of the same low-level bokeh.models objects. You can can think of bokeh.models as very basic building blocks, and the other higher level APIs as conveniences that help you to assemble the building blocks more efficiently and correctly.
So, in that light, yes, it is perfectly fine to embed a bokeh.chart using exactly the same functions described in Embedding Plots and Apps.
The one thing I will add is that if you need to update the plot's data after the fact, in place, then the bokeh.figure API will probably be more straightforward. The mapping between your data, and what gets plotted is more direct. Things generated by bokeh.charts may transform your input data into entirely different forms before plotting (e.g. you give a series, and Histogram has to spit out coordinates for boxes—not the data you started with)
We are creating a speed limit map application using different colors to highlight street with different speed limits (similar to ITO speed limit map: http://www.itoworld.com/map/124?lon=-79.37151&lat=43.74796&zoom=12).
The problem we have is that we are conducting our own research and have our own speed limit data instead of pulling the data from OpenStreetMap or Google Map like ITO map. We also need to create a data storage in order to dynamically update the map as we add more speed limit information in the future.
Is there anyway to create our own instance of OpenStreetMap and replace only the speed limit information with our own data? We don't have any vector data and we have no experience working with them.
Is there any suggestion of tools to use for creating highlighting layers based on the speed limit we have? Is OpenLayers a good option?
Any help is appreciated, thank you very much.
Update 2013/11/20
Thank you very much for your answers, now we have a much better understanding of your problem. This is a university design project so we basically have no budget. We are looking for:
1) A basic "base map" that include the basic tile information (openstreetmap seems a good choice since google map api doesn't provide free road information as long as we can find)
2) A geo data server that can host our own street speed limit data (looks like geoserver and mapserver are good choices), or a design simple database that can fulfill our need(doesn't know is it possible yet)
3) A plotting tool that can render our speed limit data as "group of lines" on the map since these data will be changed frequently (openlayers and leaflet are good candidates).
Is there anything else needed?
What you want to do is a trivial programming task once you have decided a few things:
These are probably the three biggest questions you need to answer. I added some commentary, but look at each of these questions beyond this post to find what works for you.
Who do you want to use for your map? Since you only have one type of data you will want to display that data on someone else's nice looking map. The big choices are Bing, Google, OpenLayers/OSM, and ESRI. Your choice will most likely be driven by the licensing of the above services and if you are willing to pay or not. A need to support mobile devices may also factor into your decision. Since the map is what your users will see, choose the best looking map you can afford.
How will you serve up your data? You have several options to serve your speed limit data. GeoServer and MapServer and ESRI are some popular mapping software packages. If you only displaying a few layers of data all mapping software will be overkill. The actual software to render your map data will most likely affect only your pocket book, so free is good here usually.
Tiles vs Lines
You will server your data as either a group of lines sent to the browser, or as pre-rendered tiles to be loaded on top of the map. If you data changes frequently you will want to serve it dynamically as line data (an array of points.) If your data does not change frequently, you should consider tiling your data. Tiling involves pre-rending of the entire map at all zoom levels. This allows the map to be loaded very fast and this how almost all base maps are rendered. The downside is that the tile generation can take a long amount of time and tiles can take a large amount of space.
This is a very broad question. There are many components to drawing your own speed limit map.
On the front-end, there is a web browser map interface. OpenLayers is good at that. There are plenty of other tools that can do this as well, such as Leaflet or even Google Maps API.
Next is something to provide the actual speed limit route data. This can be served as a vector layer or a raster layer. There are plenty of tools here, too. UMN Mapserver is free and reasonably good. ESRI makes a whole fleet of products in this area as well.
The speed limit route data also needs to be saved somehow. This can be done in files or in a database such as PostGIS. Again, lots of great options.
It is the role of the system architect to determine which technologies to employ to solve the problem.
My client wants some of the functionality of Google maps namely:
- geocoding
- generating maps with points based on postal code or long.lat
- optimal trip mapping
Their issues with Google maps
- cannot control outages
- postal codes are sometimes inaccurate or not updated frequently for Canada/UK
- they have no way to correct inaccurate information
They would prefer to host the mapping application themselves, but will require postal code updates.
Can anyone suggest such a product?
thanks
"cannot control outages - postal codes are sometimes inaccurate or not updated frequently for Canada/UK - they have no way to correct inaccurate information"
Outages
hosting your own mapping is the only way to control this, but you would be very very hard pushed to beat Google Maps / Bing Maps uptime over the last 5 years. Take a look at the following:
OpenStreetMap for the road imagery data, this is open source data very good in the UK (Im not sure about canada) and you can make your own changes and submit them (or just change the data you have downloaded)
Geoserver, Mapnik or MapServer will read openstreetmapdata and create the image tiles needed to create your own maps in whatever style you wish. Depending on if you dont want all countries and all zoom levels these products can create all the tiles you will need in advance, but usually they have to be created in real time and cached. You need a BIG fast server to manage tile crunching
Openlayers or Leaflet are open source javascript mapping platforms that will display your tiles for you
Obviously this is just for road maps, aerial imagery would cost you an absolute fortune.
Post Code Data
Many people do not realize that UK postcode data for latitude and longitude is now completely free and available to download every quarter from the official source (ordinance survey) http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/products/code-point-open/index.html.
This is the same data source Google will use and there is none better but it will always contain inaccuracies and always be a few months out of date.
Finally
Hopefully that answer the question you asked and gives you information to inform your client. Now for the question you didn't ask "Is this approach good value to my client?".
I won't presume to know your business or client, however what I described above is possible but with one to many months of work involved to get it all working together and even then it wont have any where near the performance or uptime of something like google /bing maps and only offers a small subset of their features.
I think you're looking for something like Caliper-It's a very custom, and I would expect expensive, solution. Not suggested.
http://www.caliper.com/GISMappingSoftwareDevelopment.htm
One solution could be to use two different mapping services and compare their results, this way there's a much better chance the data is accurate. You can also fix inaccurate data by creating a system which acts as a barrier between the API and your user, where data you know is inaccurate is corrected before it's displayed. Not sure exactly what you're doing though, so this might not work for you.
Is trip mapping/routing the basic functionality you want to do?
Before rushing into rolling your own, I'd suggest a good think about the consequences of doing so. The first that springs to mind is whilst the pros are that you can now control your data, the cons are that you now control your data.
So you are going to have to consider where and when you get updates and the processes you are going to have to employ to keep your maps in sync with the rest of the world. There are a lot of headaches involved in these things which is why so many people use externally hosted solutions such as Googles.
I am working on creating a tool to select a place via Google Maps API. This part is simple and I have no problems with it, but it is too specific. I want to do something similar to this, but need to accommodate the entire world, not just zip codes.
I would think the same effect should be able to be achieved by the highlighting an administrative level. Does this require KML file, and if so can anyone through a provider that might have this level of detail?
You can get administrative boundaries for the world here http://www.gadm.org/ or here http://www.unsalb.org/. You will not be able to achieve this with a single KML file though, as this would be one big file (I am talking about at least four hundred MB and there is a 4MB limit for KML files on Maps).
You will need to store the data in the db and pull out only relevant boundaries and draw them as polygons on the map. In other words it sounds like you might need a GIS server(open or ArcGis). Although you could build it from scratch using any geo-enabled db such as mySQL or MSSQL.
How do I take shapefiles and extract lat/lng coords so I can plot polygons on Google Maps?
http://www2.census.gov/cgi-bin/shapefiles/national-files
I asked this question here:
http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Maps-API/browse_thread/thread/18763b4b0cb996c7
and they told me WHAT to do, but not HOW to do it =P
Thx!
It depends on how you need to accomplish this. If you just need a few shapes, you can look up the coordinates in those files yourself. You can use those coordinates to create a GPolygon in Google Maps.
If you need lots of shapes - you'll need to do it programmatically. I would suggest using your favorite language to parse the XML file and retrieve the coordinates for each shape.
I had a similar problem last year when I was developing a screensaver to render presidential polling data. I didn't really want to invest the time to parse the Shapefiles data on the census site (The spec is here if you missed it).
Not sure if I actually saved any time here, but I ended writing a python app to render the 50 states onscreen, trace the edges and then store the data in a simple text format. Not sure if my data is high res enough for your application, but you can grab the data I generated here:
http://www.cannonade.net/pnt.zip
N.B. The data I generate are not latitude/longitudes, but with some scaling you should be able to translate them.
Good luck.
I had better luck using the ARC files at http://www.census.gov/geo/www/cob/index.html
I can't find the webpage right now, but I did find one that had actual code. Google something like "arc to kml" and go from there.