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mapmakers-cheatsheet's Introduction
What kind of data do you have?
How much data?
Just enough
Lots of points, and each point has data that you want to be able to explore. For instance, apartment listings which might number 10 per city block, but you want to be able to click on them and see photos and links.
Too much and the points have some value that can be aggregated
Create hexbins of your points with the QGIS hexbin plugin, to make
polygons. Start again at Polygons
Too much and the points just represent presence - like tweets
Tons of data, and you don't need labels? Use tippecanoe .
How much data?
Just enough
Convert the data to GeoJSON & make a simple Leaflet map
Too much, the polygons have necessary detail
Too much, the polygons have unnecessary details or many of the polygons have shared borders, like state or province maps
What kind of attributes?
Absolute numbers
Convert the points to centroids with QGIS and start from Points
Normalize absolutes to rates by dividing over polygon area,
and start from Rates
Rates or Categories
Temporal data - values over time
Multivariate data: like counts of different species or ethnicities
Names of places, like countries
With IDs:
ISO2 or ISO3 codes
Download Natural Earth data at the right level, join with QGIS,
and start again at Polygons
ZIP codes
Without IDs
Find data with IDs, or manually join with polygons
Addresses
You can't map addresses directly. Geocode them with OpenRefine or
Geo for Google Docs , and then start at Points
Other Geocoding options:
geocoding libraries
Small amounts of data: use Leaflet
Lots of data, or need line labels (are they streets?)? Use Mapbox Studio
Tons of data, and you don't need line labels? Use datamaps .
Already georectified & cleaned (from satellites or fixed-up sources)
If you want to host it yourself
Render tiles with MapTiler , publish them on S3 or some other service, view them in Leaflet
If you want someone else to host & process
Upload to Mapbox and view in Mapbox GL JS or any client
Read processing satellite imagery to understand GDAL /ImageMagick workflow.
Raster images from drones
Raster images from scanned maps
A format that I can't read
Install GDAL and use ogr2ogr to convert the file. If you can't install
this, you can use it online with Ogre
Commercial tools:
Ask your source for a better file format
I want raw data right from the source, up to the minute, in its original form? planet.osm
Drawbacks: downloads are very large and require specialized tools to process
I want raw data for subsets of the world: Geofabrik extracts or Mapzen metro extracts
Drawbacks: only includes predefined areas, not as up-to-date as Planet.osm
I want data useful for fast basemaps , already processed into vector tiles: Mapbox
Drawbacks: doesn't include all features or all tags on features, only those appropriate for visualization
I want raw data as tiles, which include more data and complete tags: OSM QA Tiles
Drawbacks: much larger & slower than tiles designed for visualization
I want a specific subset of data by area, filter, and want the newest data possible: Overpass
Drawbacks: can't return country-sized chunks of data, only smaller subsets
I want filtered, up-to-date extracts in extra formats like KMZ, Garmin Image, etc: HOT Export Tool
Drawbacks: can't do arbitrary regions
Government Data
Contact the town or federal GIS dept you need
Use FOIAMachine.org to request data via FOIA
Personal Data
If you want to create data, use geojson.io and draw it.
Global Data
Historical Data
Projection:
If it's a web map with tiles, use Spherical Mercator . This is the default for Leaflet, Mapbox GL JS, and most other clients.
If using d3 and not using tiles anywhere, use whatever fits best. Bonus projections are in d3-geo-projection .
Have a projection and not sure what it is? Use epsg.io .
Colors:
Scales:
For any data
Try linear first
Then quantile
For data of rates or compounding values
Points:
Start with normal circles with no strokes
Scale points by area, not diameter
Flair:
Only add a north arrow if north isn't up
Always attribute your data, especially OpenStreetMap , to avoid the nerd wrath
If it zooms, add visible zoom controls. Pan isn't necessary, but not everyone has a scroll wheel / multitouch
mapmakers-cheatsheet's People
Contributors
mapmakers-cheatsheet's Issues
Colorbrewer shouldn't be recommended for dark backgrounds, and carto colors work on dark.
Wouldn'T it be good to show some example images on the one or the other point?!
Need to get the facts from the pros and then write them down.
For the user it would be probably good to provide some numbers on what are the numbers behind your "size categories"
Mapbox has officially retired TileMill and I was wondering if there was a more current alternative out there. Thanks!
Too much and the points just represent presence - like tweets
Create a heatmap with Leaflet.heat or QGIS heatmap plugin. If you
Right now the cheatsheet doesn't cover if you've got way too many points, enough make it unrealistic to initial processing via anything but a command line client.
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