plat-dns

A plat is a map, drawn to scale, showing the divisions of a piece of land. Plat-dns is a tool that uses the dns system to let domain owners administer their land divisions with ease.

Sales Pitch

Are you a government that maintains census tracks, admins regions, state line? Are you a business that has regional operations and need to create and administer maps? Are you an indigenous group that is tired of the google maps view of a region?

If any of the above are true, plat-dns is an easy way for you to manage your world.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

1. Access to a domain name and its name server. You will need to be able to add a record to the name server you manage.
2. Node installed. See (https://nodejs.org/en/)
3. Dat installed. npm i dat -g

Step 1 - Decide domain path

Let's say you are admin a city with the domain edmonton.ca. You might want to partition your domain with 'neighbourhoods.edmonton.ca', so you'd have 'oliver.neighbourhoods.edmonton.ca' and 'mccauley.neighbourhoods.edmonton.ca'

Step 2 - Choose a plat-dns server

You can run this project on a server, or use our public plat server at ns.ramage.in

Step 3 - Add an NS record that points to plat

Type: NS, Host: neighbourhoods, Value: ns.ramage.in

Use the above information to put a record in your nameserver. This will point all *.neighbourhoods.edmonton.ca queries to the plat server selected in step 2.

Step 4 - Create a folder that will hold your shape files

On your computer create a folder that will hold your shape files, and only your shape files

Step 5 - Create some shape files

As a suggestion to test, you can go to http://geojson.io, and create a point, or polygon of your location. Then In the menu click save -> GeoJson. Copy that file to the folder in step 4, and rename it the domain that it represents, eg oliver.neighbourhoods.edmonton.ca . Don't add a suffix.

Repeat this step with all the shapes you want to name.

Step 5 - Share this folder

Using the dat command line do the following. Change directory to the folder created in step 4.

cd ~/src/shapefiles
dat .

Created new dat in /Users/alice/src/shapefiles/.dat
dat://c81299cfc139791ccc6db42f0bcac8a9af590c03828e8066478fcfc60ca6e481

Step 6 - register with the server

Now that you've delegated to the domain to plat, you need to tell it about your dat. Take that long ID from step 5 and do the following

curl -X POST neighbourhoods.edmonton.ca/dat/c81299cfc139791ccc6db42f0bcac8a9af590c03828e8066478fcfc60ca6e481

Step 7 - test

Now in a browser you should be able to visit http://oliver.neighbourhoods.edmonton.ca. A google map pin will be returned to you!

Notes

• You can continue to add/edit/delete files in your shared folder. These will magically update on the domain.
• dat is a p2p protocol so you might want to create a mirror of your data on hashbase.io or another peer service

The Dream

One day, in map providers, you will be able to put in a dns into their search box, and a beautiful polygon will appear. Google does not have to manage it, and you have ownership over it.