places.pub is an early-stage, experimental API that provides place objects compatible with ActivityPub protocols to enrich posts with location information or announce geosocial activities such as “arrived” (in other words, checking in), leaving, or travelling between places.
One important need for geosocial software is that all objects in ActivityPub, including Place objects, need to have a permanent URL as their id property, which shares the description of that object in Activity Streams 2.0 format. However, there isn’t a good dataset of geographical objects — countries, states or provinces or regions, cities, buildings, businesses, parks, streets — available in AS2 on the Web right now. That is slowing down experimentation in the Geosocial Task Force.
The API serves two functions: it enables social-networking applications to find locations and access places via unique URLs. It’s a surprisingly small application that runs on OpenStreetMap data hosted on Google Cloud Public Datasets.
Instead of sloshing the huge OSM dataset back and forth, I used the version of the data stored in the Google Cloud Public Datasets system on BigQuery. This let me ignore the effort of moving data, and just focus on giving it a good ActivityPub-compatible interface using a Google Cloud Run function.
So, who’s going to build an ActivityPub-compatible Swarm clone?
I’d love to see a similar interface for generating GDAL commands; Cameron Kruse:
Tippecanoe has great documentation in its ReadMe with all the info you need to get started, but I’ve often found that half the battle is finding the commands, deciding which ones to use and stringing them together into a coherent command you can actually run in your terminal. I’ve made this a little easier by taking many of the Tippecanoe features and converting them into an interface you can use to generate your commands. The premise of this tool is you select all the options you want from the dashboard and a command is generated below you can copy and paste in your terminal.
The good folks at Heigit have released ohsome-planet, a handy tool to turn OpenStreetMap history data from PBF into GeoParquet files, ready to use in common GIS applications.
Working with raw OSM data presents several challenges due to its complex structure. Typically, users require data that is readily compatible with Geographic Information System (GIS) applications. Our new tool streamlines this process, providing a structured and GIS-ready dataset for improved usability.
The tool also enriches OSM element data by integrating information from OSM changesets and administrative boundaries. This additional contextual data allows for more efficient and straightforward spatial analysis, further improving the utility of OSM datasets.
The tool is written in Java and you have to build it yourself; a small price to pay for more easily accessible free and open data.
I tried to estimate the cost of hosting Protomaps on AWS before; now there’s a handy tool for that. Based on monthly tile requests you can compare the cost of hosting Protomaps on AWS or Cloudflare with the cost of using maps from Google or hosted map-tile providers.
A comprehensive overview of libraries, command-line and web tools, frameworks, and data providers that have already adopted the recently released GeoParquet 1.0 standard.
DuckDB is a database management system for data analytics that has picked up steam in the recent months within the geospatial data community.
Chris Holmes documents his experiences with DuckDB and explores its potential for work with geospatial data:
I’m not the type who’s constantly jumping to new technologies and generally didn’t think that anything about a database could really impress me. But DuckDB somehow has become one of the pieces of technology – I gush about it to anyone who could possibly benefit.
There’s a lot to love about DuckDB: Its performance, its early support support for geospatial queries and data formats (although not fully mature), and smart extensions to SQL.
What sets it apart is DuckDB’s support for cloud-native operations via the httpfs extension and Parquet:
DuckDB also has the ability to work in a completely Cloud-Native Geospatial manner – you can treat remote files just like they’re on disk, and DuckDB will use range requests to optimize querying them.
In geospatial, we’re often dealing large data sets that are har to store and explore with traditional tools, unless you import the data into a database. But it’s not just going to make data access and processing easier on your computer. There’s also a great potential to move more large-data processing into the browser:
It’s not just that DuckDB is a great command-line and Python tool, but there’s also a brewing revolution with WASM, to run more and more powerful applications in the browser. DuckDB is easily run as WASM, so you can imagine a new class of analytic geospatial applications that are entirely in the browser.
Gregor MacLennan with a nice overview of the current state of Mapeo and what we can expect from future releases.
We developed Mapeo over 8 years through a co-design process with local partners, and have learned a huge amount about the challenges and opportunities of peer-to-peer technology along the way. This post shares some technical details about these challenges and how the solutions are guiding our work on “Mapeo Next”.
I’ve always admired the work of Digital Democracy, especially on Mapeo. They’ve built a great product for collaborative and participatory mapping, something we didn’t quite pull off when I worked at ExCiteS and Cadasta.
Where can you get within 40 minutes from every subway station in New York? Chris Whong’s fun, interactive map shows you, using GTFS data from New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Turf.js to calculate the isochrones.
This year, OpenStreetMap US stepped forward to become a steward of Field Papers for the community going forward. The transition makes sense; not only is the tool used extensively by the mapping community globally and in the US, it is also used a great deal by educators through OpenStreetMap US’s TeachOSM program and other education initiatives
While it will now be under the umbrella of OpenStreetMap US, Field Papers will be maintained as a global tool available for mappers around the world. In the next year, OpenStreetMap US will be working to develop a plan for maintenance and development that pulls in the knowledge and skills of the volunteer community, as well as expanding the financial resources available to the project.
So far, Placemark, a bootstrapped one-person project, was only available for paying customers. Now Tom released a free tier, Placemark Play, which provides the same user interface and similar features as the paid tier. The main difference to the paid tier is that Placemark won’t save your data; once your browser session ends, your data is gone.
Without data storage, Placemark Play can be compared to Geojson.io, which handles data persistence similarly, although Geojson.io offers to restore data from the last session. Placemark, however, provides a slicker user interface and more advanced geometry operations (buffers, simplification, convex hulls), imports and exports from and to various geospatial data formats, and design and export map styles for MapboxGL and Leaflet.
Placemark Play is a great option for quick data visualisation and advanced editing, when you need a little more capabilities than Geojson.io.