Vector tile river map

May 21, 2013 11:02 AM

Vector tile river map
I made a tutorial for open source maps with vector tiles. The result is a slippy map of American rivers and some pretty static maps of every US river. But my real goal is the tutorial source code, to help other developers learn to make their own vector maps from geographic data.

Role: programmer

posted by Nelson (9 comments total)

THIS. IS. AWESOME.
posted by gwint at 9:10 PM on May 21, 2013 [1 favorite]

Thanks! It's kind of a technical project, but then again the output is pretty. Last night I shoved a bunch of OpenStreetMap vector sources together and made some colorful maps.
posted by Nelson at 10:36 AM on May 22, 2013

I must agree, awesome. I don't suppose you have a torrent anywhere to a Virtual Appliance / disk image of a full working server, do you?
posted by XMLicious at 1:54 AM on May 23, 2013

I don't, sorry, but that's an interesting idea I'll consider. The required software installation is not too difficult but my docs aren't as precise as I'd like.
posted by Nelson at 7:40 AM on May 23, 2013

Does this provide the ability to query features - ie. click on a river, get back data with its name etc.? At the moment I'm rendering vector features using Geoserver, but this looks like an interesting alternative.
posted by Jimbob at 7:08 PM on May 29, 2013

This version of the client map lets you click on rivers to see name and HUC8 code. That data is coming back from every tile served via HTTP. There's a lot more data in NHD (and subsequently, the PostGIS database) that I don't currently publish. But really this is a tutorial; my goal is to teach you how to take the source data from NDHPlus and process it to your needs.
posted by Nelson at 7:46 AM on May 30, 2013

An update of sorts; that static image I posted to Flickr proved to be quite popular and got picked up in a lot of publications. I blogged about how it spread, I think Jason Kottke's blog was the key enabler. So it went from Reddit to Wired Design to the Daily Mail Online to Reader's Digest (print!). I think it helped a lot I posted the image with a permissive license, turns out lots of publications will print your work if it's interesting enough and free.

My biggest regret now is not being a bit more accurate with that one static image. It was sort of a one-off side effect of my primary project, but it turns out to be all anyone saw. There's some bugs in the data and I could have explained it better. Ah well, lesson learned.
posted by Nelson at 1:44 PM on November 21, 2013

very cool. Louisiana is very difficult. let me know if you run into trouble there
posted by eustatic at 10:45 AM on October 23, 2016

there's a tremendous amount of uses in the mississippi river delta map, it just seems wrong to have it as "blank" when there's millions of dollars of economic activity in the shallow water, and multiple competing territories of user groups. Much of our economy is based on the water, but it's not on these maps. There are tremendous national political problems that occur in these terriories, but most people have no understanding of the resource use conflicts; maps could go a long way toward building understanding. in lieu of understanding, Louisiana is ruled by oil companies from TX, and Nav companies from the Midwest.

There's also tremendous change in the land water boundary from year to year because of the ecological restoration program.

A resource to consider is the SONRIS.com GIS database. If you can't download a layer from this interface, you can email LA CPRA to get data. I have the layer of oyster leases, for example.
posted by eustatic at 11:18 AM on October 23, 2016