A 3D Mountain Map of the Earth

This repository holds configuration files, installation instructions, and live GitHub pages for my 3D global mountain map website.

The website is intended as a simple demonstration of how a global interactive 3D map of Earth mountains, adhering to the time-proven rules of cartographic design may be built with open-source technology and freely available data.

The website has been created to accompany my talk "Visual Hierarchies in 3D cartography With VTS", first held at FOSS4G-NA 2019 in San Diego in April 2019.

You are invited to clone this repository and use it as a base for your own 3D mapping projects. To recreate the original mountain map, simply follow the instructions below, or fork the repository and do the same.

Using This Repository to Run Your Own 3D Mountain Map

Prerequisites

You will need a functioning vts-geospatial backend. The easiest way to do this is to use Melowntech's public repositories for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

First, set up the repository on your system:

    $ sudo apt install apt-transport-https
    $ cd /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ && sudo wget http://cdn.melown.com/packages/conf/melown-bionic.list
    $ wget -O - http://cdn.melown.com/packages/keys/oss.packages%40melown.com.key | sudo apt-key add -

And install VTS backend:

    $ sudo apt-get update
    $ sudo apt-get install vts-backend

The remainder of this tutorial presumes that you have set up your Vtsgeo backend in this way - if you choose another way, such as manually installing Vtsgeo from sources, you need to change some of the paths according to your installation.

Perform any of the bellow steps as the vts system user:

    # sudo -iu vts

Cloning the repository

Clone the repository into vts user home directory

    $ mkdir -p ~/git && cd ~/git
    $ git clone https://github.com/ondra-prochazka/a-3d-mountain-map-of-the-earth.git

and create some symlinks to the project's storage views and resource configuration files:

    $ cd ~/git/a-3d-mountain-map-of-the-earth
    $ mkdir -p ~/store/a-3d-mountain-map
    $ ln -s $PWD/var_vts_store_a-3d-mountain-map_stylesheet ~/store/a-3d-mountain-map/stylesheet
    $ ln -s $PWD/var_vts_store_a-3d-mountain-map_map-config ~/store/a-3d-mountain-map/map-config
    $ ln -s $PWD/etc_vts_mapproxy_a-3d-mountain-map_d /etc/vts/mapproxy/a-3d-mountain-map.d
    $ ln -s $PWD/var_vts_mapproxy_datasets_a-3d-mountain-map /var/vts/mapproxy/datasets/a-3d-mountain-map

Setting up tileset storage

Add global Viewfinder Panoramas DEM to vtsd storage:

    $ vts ~/store/stage.melown2015 –add \ 	          
       //cdn.melown.com/vts/melown2015/terrain/global/viewfinder3/ --top

Setting up the local resources

Download the peaklist.org's list of ultra-prominent peaks (also, read the terms of use for this dataset):

    $ wget http://cdn.melown.com/pub/vts-tutorials/high-terrain/world1500.json \
        -O ~/mapproxy/datasets/a-3d-mountain-map/world1500.json 

Configuring the backend

Make vts-mapproxy aware of the project's resources. Add the following line to /etc/vts/mapproxy/resources.json (before the closing bracket):

    , { "include": "a-3d-mountain-map.d/*.json" }

and make the server take notice (as root):

    $ /etc/init.d/vts-backend-mapproxy force-update    

Finally, make a subtle change to vts-vtsd config file, to make it handle the project's stylesheets properly. Open /etc/vts/vtsd/vtsd.conf, find this snippet:

    # Disable dataset handling for stylesheets
    [location</stylesheet>]

and modify it as follows:

    # Disable dataset handling for stylesheets
    [location<stylesheet>]

That is it! Point your browser to http://<your-server>:8070/store/a-3d-mountain-map/map-config/map and enjoy the beauty of Earth's landforms.

Legal notice

Please respect any license restrictions applicable to the data sources used in this demonstration. Respective copyright holders are clearly marked in the bottom-right area of the map window: