tourism=yes visualises buildings located in Bulgarian parks, reserves and protected nature zones. Building footprints are fetched from OpenStreetMap and intersected with a number of Bulgarian nature reserves. The footprints are categorized based on their tourism tag value.

The goal is to show the locations and extent of nature reserves in Bulgaria, show and verify the presence and locations of tourist buildings and spot dodgy buildings i.e. non-touristic buildings in nature parks such as private chalets, mass tourism hotels on mountain peaks, etc.

Additionally, viewers are invited to contribute to OSM by correcting mistakes, amending existing objects and/or adding new ones.

CartoDB API

The application is powered by CartoDB which means that you get a powerful SQL API for free. You can query the buildings and nature_areas tables by firing a GET request at

http://simeon.cartodb.com/api/v2/sql?q=SELECT count(*) FROM buildings

and/or

http://simeon.cartodb.com/api/v2/sql?q=SELECT count(*) FROM nature_areas

Getting all buildings with an empty tourism tag is done as

http://simeon.cartodb.com/api/v2/sql?q=SELECT * FROM buildings WHERE tourism ISNULL    

CartoDB runs on PostGIS which means you can do nifty geo stuff like

http://simeon.cartodb.com/api/v2/sql?q=SELECT ST_Area(the_geom) FROM nature_areas LIMIT 10

The SQL API can handle GET and POST request which allows you to retrieve data through e.g. jQuery as

$.getJSON('http://simeon.cartodb.com/api/v2/sql/?q=SELECT count(*) FROM Buildings', function(data) {
    $.each(data.rows, function(key, val) {
    // do something!
  });
});

Or through CartoDB.js as

cartodb.createLayer(map, 'http://simeon.cartodb.com/api/v2/viz/46345544-6d62-11e3-99da-5404a6a69006/viz.json', function(layer) {
    layer.createSubLayer({
        sql: 'SELECT * FROM buildings',
        cartocss: '#layer { marker-fill: red; }'
    });
}).addTo(map);

Roll your own

The remainder of this document describes how to map an area of your choice. The instructions are written for Ubuntu 12.04 and assume you have a working PostGIS configuration (scroll to the bottom if you need help setting it up). The result of the described process is a list of buildings that lie within nature areas that you can host on MapBox / CartoDB / GeoServer, etc.

The buildings footprints come from OpenStreetMap whereas the nature reserve areas come from the Bulgarian Executive Environment Agency.

Building footprints

Building data can come from anywhere; OpenStreetMap is great for this project as Bulgarian open data isn't a rich as, say, Dutch data.

There are numerous ways of getting OSM data. Here we'll use the Overpass API's XAPI endpoint. We get everything that OSM knows about Bulgaria by quering the API with curl as

curl --location --globoff "http://overpass.osm.rambler.ru/cgi/xapi?*[bbox=22.394248233556354,41.235366211879473,28.633039945734783,44.213393561835581]" -o bg.osm

The API is quite sophisticated and allows for numerous filters and quries. For instance, we can extract only the building footprints as

curl --location --globoff "http://overpass.osm.rambler.ru/cgi/xapi?way[building=yes][bbox=22.394248233556354,41.235366211879473,28.633039945734783,44.213393561835581]" -o bg_buildings.osm

Nature reserves

The most probable place to get information about nature reserves in your area is to look for your province/region/country's spatial data portal. If you can not find such a thing have a look at the areas designated in the European Union's Natura2000 directive:

Natura2000 2 dataset

Natura2000 3 dataset

Natura2000 4 dataset

Store and manage data

PostGIS is an extension to PostgreSQL that handles spatial data. Storing the OSM extract in a spatial database allows us to perform spatial queries and analyses such as bounding box searches, intersections, area calculations, coordinate transformations, etc. all of which are indexed and hence super fast.

OpenStreetMap

Importing bg_buildings.osm in PostGIS is painless thanks to the efforts of the OSM community. They've written several utilities that interact with databases. One of them, osm2pgsql, is a nifty command line utility that converts the OSM datastructure to a GIS friendly format and inserts it in PostGIS.

On Ubuntu you can get osm2pgsql from Kai Krueger's Launchpad repository as

sudo add-apt repository ppa:kakrueger/openstreetmap
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install osm2pgsql

Once you have osm2pgsql you can populate the database with

osm2pgsql -U postgres -H localhost -W -d osm -l bg_buildings.osm

osm2pgsql creates four tables: point, line and polygon representations of the OSM geometries and a separate table that contains the roads. We'll use the planet_osm_polygons table later to intersect the OSM building footprints it contains with the nature reserve areas.

Nature reserves

The most probable format you'll find government data in is esri's Shapefile which you can insert in PostGIS with the shp2pgsql utility as

shp2pgsql -d -I -i -s 4326 reserves.shp reserves > insert.sql

shp2pgsql produces a SQL script that you can read with PostGIS' command-line interface psql as

psql -U postgres -h localhost -d osm -f insert.sql    

This creates a reserves table in the osm database.

Modify and analyse data

Features in government datasets are often coded in mysterious ways. In the current case the nature reserves are denoted by a three character code in the format BGn where n goes from 1 to 6. We add an additional column to the reserves table to hold more meaningful designators.

ALTER TABLE reserves
ADD zone_class char;

Map code abbreviations to zone types as

UPDATE reserves
SET zone_class = "parks"
WHERE desig_abbr = "BG5";

Now that we have all the data in the databse we can perform spatial queries. The one needed here is an intersection of all OSM buildings with all nature reserve areas. In PostGIS this is done by calling the ST_Intersects function as

SELECT osm_id, desig_abbr, name, tourism, amenity, way 
FROM planet_osm_polygon, reserves
WHERE ST_Intersects(way, geom);

We can write the result of this query to a Shapefile using the pgsql2shp utility as

pgsql2shp -f buildings -h localhost -u postgres osm "SELECT osm_id, desig_abbr, name, tourism, amenity, way FROM planet_osm_polygon, reserves where ST_Intersects(way, geom)"

We can also use ogr2ogr to write the result to different formats e.g. GeoJSON as

ogr2ogr -f GeoJSON buildings.shp PG:"dbname='' host='' user='' password=''" -sql "SELECT osm_id, desig_abbr, name, tourism, amenity, way FROM planet_osm_polygon, reserves WHERE ST_intersects(way, geom)"

Note ogr2ogr is your Swiss army knife when dealing with geo data. Knowing only a little bit about it will make your life significantly more pleasant.

Manual / databaseless workflow

Don't want to bother with databases? You can perform the same analysis manually with QGIS.

• Import bg_buildings.osm in QGIS with the OpenStreetMap plugin. The plugin generates three layers: points, lines and polygons. The latter contains the building footprints.
• Intersect building footprints with the geometries of your reserves using the built-in QGIS vector tools.
• Export the result as a Shapefile or GeoJSON and load in e.g. Tilemill / CartoDB
• Done!

Other considerations

Filtering OSM data with osmosis

osmosis is a command line application for processing OSM data. osmosis is super handy when you're working with data from e.g. OpenStreetMap.org's exporter, Metro Extracts or similar)

Extract buildings from a larger OSM extract

osmosis --read-xml bg.osm --tf accept-ways building=yes --write-xml bg_buildings.osm

Simplifying geometries

The nature reserve geometries might be too detailed for the mapping engine or hosting solution of choice (in this case CartoDB). A workaround is to simplify them in order to reduce the file size and lower the strain on the rendering engine. PostGIS can do that for you as

SELECT sitetype, ST_Simplify(geom, 0.000025) FROM reserves

Installing and configuring PostGIS on Ubuntu

TODO