Practical and Impractical Uses of Terrain Data

Stamen Design
Chris Henrick
NACIS 2016

NOTES:

About Me:

• Design Technologist at Stamen Design:

• part web developer, part Cartographer, part data wrangler, part UXer

• Started out as a cartographer & GIS specialist

• first NACIS was 2009 in Sacramento, CA & I got my start after that

• Much of this work is the result of hard work by Seth Fitzsimmons & Alan McConchie, I helped out towards the end

About Stamen:

• Design & Technology study in San Francisco, CA

• Started in 2001 by Eric Rodenbeck following the wake of the dot com crash

• Specialize in creating highly customized data-visulizations and interactive maps

• Work with clients ranging from Toyota, UC Berkeley, NPS, & the Dali Lama

Open Terrain

• main source of this work is from the Open Terrain project

  • started before my time at Stamen,

  • piggy backing on previous work done for Knight

  • Dot Spotting, Toner, Watercolor

• supported by a Knight News grant

• goals: catalog open terrain data, via researching & crowd sourcing

• create & document workflows using open source software for processing terrain data

Outcomes:

• Wiki on Github

• Terrain Classic map tiles (will talk more about that next)

• AWS Tiler (serverless map tile generation)

Variants:

• Humaniterrain:

  • Terrain layer to the Humanitarian OSM Map Tiles,

  • right after the 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Nepal

  • helped give context to the map styles, printed and used by aid workers in the field

• Toner

• Watercolor

• Darkmatter

• Positron

• Terrain Classic

Terrain Classic

• global version of Stamen’s Terrain map tiles

• partly a style port to CartoCSS, was previously built using Cascadenik

• other tech includes: Node JS, Postgres w/ PostGIS, Mapnik, Make, Tessera

• used with AWS Lambda Tiler for background, lines, labels, & hillshades

• variants sandwiched together for main tile labels

• Terrain data sourced from Mapzen’s Elevation Data API

Outcomes:

• although it has terrain, it’s also a more general purpose map style then Toner, journalists in mind

• free, public tile source in the after math of Mapquest shutting down its tile service

• no API key required

• Tom Patterson's Web Shaded Relief

Samples:

• Kilamanjaro

• Denali

• Mt Shashta

• Grand Canyon

• Himalayas

• Alps

AWS Tiler

• Technique created by Seth

• AWS services: Lambda, S3, EC2, API Gateway

• various ways to wrangle cloud computing

• GDAL: Raster Overviews & Warped VRTs

• use Python with rasterio & matplotlib for Tile Generation

• Docker & Apex.io

• Source data: raster or Postgres

Outcomes:

• very cost efficient when compared to using a map tile provider

  • pay for what you use,

  • scales down as well as up

  • only pay for what you use

• allows for maintaining ownership of your tiles

• no tile server so no server upkeep and maintenance

• works well for tiling raster data or OSM data (files many GB in size)

• can be applied to a ranged of uses: Open Aerial Map

Caveats:

• Set up and AWS configuration can be tricky

  • installing dependencies

  • creating IAM roles & policies

• Initial title generation is slow if seeded by users

  • little bit more time because of read & write

  • if tile doesn’t exist, create it then send it to the client

  • after tiles are created the loading is much faster

Impractical Uses

• wouldn’t be a Stamen project if we didn’t experiment

• some triangular terrain experiments by Alan McConchie

• non-traditional representation of terrain data

• Marin County, north of San Francisco

• Washington State / Seattle area

• Seth’s Sim City isometric terrain view

• Seth’s TIN: isometric view, color to elevation & aspec

Thank You!