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Foreign and Commonwealth Office Travel Advice & News

This app forms part of the Gov UK platform. It provides FCO Travel Advice and News.

Requirements

  • Rails 3.1
  • MySQL

How to use

rake api:import synchronises with the FCO API. Run as often as you like.

About the maps

The map tiles were generated using TileMill, with the following stylesheet:

@base: #95cfee;
@land: #438214;

Map { background-color:@base; }

.water-poly { polygon-fill:@base; }

#land[zoom>=0] {
  polygon-fill: @land;
  polygon-gamma:0.7;
}

This was then exported at zoom levels 1-8 for the whole world to a MBTile file. This file was then converted into an {x}/{y}/{z} tree of PNG images, using TileStache:

./tilestache-seed.py --from-mbtiles coastlines.mbtiles -c tilestache_config.json --layer coastlines

With the config file:

{
  "cache": {
    "name": "Disk",
    "path": "/tmp/stache",
    "umask": "0000",
    "dirs": "portable",
    "gzip": ["xml", "json"]
  },
  "layers": {
    "coastlines": {
      "provider": {
        "name": "mbtiles",
        "tileset": "coastlines.mbtiles"
      }
    }
  }
}

This tree of files was then uploaded to the Amazon S3 bucket tiles.alphagov.co.uk/coastlines.

The country borders are provided as vector files. These were download from the Natural Earth 50m cultural dataset, and converted to GeoJSON using ogr2ogr:

ogr2ogr -f "GeoJSON" borders.json ne_50m_admin_0_countries.shp ne_50m_admin_0_countries

There's a rake task maps:generate_border_files that takes the borders.json file in data and converts it to separate files for each country, named by the ISO code and placed into public/fco-assets/borders.