Product Description

Since the dawn of creation, man has designed maps to help identify the space that we occupy. From Lewis and Clark's pencil-sketched maps of mountain trails to Jacques Cousteau's sophisticated charts of the ocean floor, creating maps of the utmost precision has been a constant pursuit. So why should things change now? Well, they shouldn't. The reality is that map creation, or "cartography," has only improved in its ease-of-use over time. In fact, with the recent explosion of inexpensive computing and the growing availability of public mapping data, map-making today extends all the way to the ordinary PC user. "Mapping Hacks", the latest page-turner from O'Reilly Press, tackles this notion head on. It's a collection of one hundred simple - and mostly free - techniques available to developers and power users who want draw digital maps or otherwise visualize geographic data. Authors Schuyler Erle, Rich Gibson, and Jo Walsh do more than just illuminate the basic concepts of location and cartography, they walk you through the process one step at a time. "Mapping Hacks" shows you where to find the best sources of geographic data, and then how to integrate that data into your own map. But that's just an appetizer. This comprehensive resource also shows you how to interpret and manipulate unwieldy cartography data, as well as how to incorporate personal photo galleries into your maps. It even provides practical uses for GPS (Global Positioning System) devices - those touch-of-a-button street maps integrated into cars and mobile phones. Just imagine: If Captain Kidd had this technology, we'd all know where to find his buried treasure! With all of these industrial-strength tips and tools, "Mapping Hacks" effectively takes the sting out of the digital map-making and navigational process. Now you can create your own maps for business, pleasure, or entertainment - without ever having to sharpen a single pencil.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #403050 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 525 pages

From the Publisher
Mapping Hacks is a collection of one hundred simple techniques available to developers and power users who want to draw digital maps. You'll learn where to find the best sources of geographic data and then how to integrate that data into your own creations. With so many industrial-strength tips and tools, Mapping Hacks effectively takes the sting out of digital mapmaking.

About the Author
Schuyler Erle was born in a small paper bag in Philadelphia, and then again five days later in Baltimore. As a youth, he had to get up every morning two hours before he went to bed in order to walk fifteen miles uphill to school, and then another seventeen miles uphill to get home in the evening. After many years of some nonsense involving Karnaugh maps, a botched attempt at a Red Cross sailing certificate, and the early works of Chomsky, Schuyler was finally and at long last sent packing with something his mentors found at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box. Later, after a tragic accident that left him nearly completely lacking in common sense, he served brief stints on Phobos and Ganymede with the Space Patrol, before returning to study n-dimensional unicycle frisbee golf at a yak herding collective in Miami. Somewhere along the line he made the grave error of attempting to implement a full-scale multi-user web application using a combination of tcsh, awk, and sed, which lead him straight into the arms of O'Reilly & Associates, first as a reader, and then as an author and humble developer. Four years & fifty thousand miles later, we present him in his full and unabridged form, where he hacks Perl behind the scenes at the O'Reilly Network, does on-site technical support for ORA's fine conferences team, is involved in a variety of database and production development projects across the company, and still manages to write and give conference talks for ORA from time to time.

Rich Gibson is a Perl/Database programmer in Santa Rosa. He has worked professionally with computers since 1982 when he created Public Utility Rate Case Models in SuperCalc on an Osborne II. His current fascination is creating tools to aid in the acquisition, management, and presentation of information with a geographic component. He is currently converting an old golf cart into a mobile geo annotation platform.Rich is active with the NoCat Community Network in Sebastopol, California, and is the primary developer of NoCat Maps (http://maps.nocat.net/).

Jo Walsh is a freelance hacker and software artist who started out building web systems for the Guardian, the ICA and state51 in London. She now works with the semantic web, spatial annotation and bots.

Excerpted from Mapping Hacks by Schuyler Erle, Rich Gibson, Jo Walsh. Copyright © 2005. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Hack #5 The Road Less Traveled by in MapQuest
The specified route may get you where you want to be, but what about that other road?

The interstates are fast and clean, but the Blue Highways are more than a routing choice. The motto of the Blue Line fan is "There is more than one way to get there." One morning I happened to stagger into life at 9:00 A.M., fretting about the coming day. I was in Portland, Oregon, at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention and wanted to get home to Sebastopol, California. The obvious and "simple" route is 656 miles down I-5, past Sebastopol, then a swoop up and around the San Francisco Bay and up 101.

Frankly, it is one of the prettier interstate drives around, but it is still an interstate drive. My car mates were lobbying hard for the purely scenic route along Highway 101. To make things a tad more complicated, we had to pick up yet another passenger in Eugene, Oregon. How much pain and time was that Blue Highway scenery going to cost me? I needed a way to quantify the tedium of the longer journey.

Everyone uses MapQuest to prepare monolithic routes, a single routing that describes the whole trip. I wanted to split that into segments and compare the time and distance of each segment. If you have connectivity, you can create multiple views of the same journey in MapQuest, or use the same techniques in any mapping service that provides directions. As an aside, the connectivity in Lithia Park in Ashland, Oregon, is stellar. The drive from Portland to Ashland is easy, so it is convenient to stop in Ashland to download a bunch of code to play with on the rest of the trip.

Get the Right Scale

Picking alternative routes requires that we can see them! Since this trip is so long, we can’t get enough detail to compare the I-5 and coastal alternatives on one map. The map in Figure 1-7 is useless for alternate route determination! In order to compare alternatives, we need to split our journey into at least two more detailed parts.

Here we can use the "Open in New Window" trick of most browsers. Navigate through MapQuest to a map that shows your complete trip and then right-click (Ctrl-click on the Mac) on the "+" sign of the Zoom tool that is along the right side of the map. In most browsers, this will open a right-click context menu that includes the option to open the link in a new window.

That’s more like it! In Figure 1-8, we can see the coastal route, and we have enough context to know what questions we want to ask next. One key to effective use of electronic maps is to zoom in close enough to see the important details, yet far enough out so as not to get lost in the detail. It is a balancing act for each exploration.

Now zoom in so that you have two identical views of the same map. Next scroll the original, less detailed map down by clicking on the arrows on the bottom (south) side of the map. The idea is to have windows of each segment of the trip with enough overlap so you can mentally stitch the maps together (see Figure 1-9).

In this case, I need a third map to capture that important area south of Mendocino! So I repeat the process of opening a new window to get three browser windows that, between them, cover the whole trip. In this case, Iright-click on the arrows pointing south to open a new window that includes Sebastopol (Figure 1-10).

There’s More Than One Way to Get There!

We want to explore the maps to get ideas about what we want to experience. This is the fun part of the process! First consider your constraints—in our case, we need to pick up Gene in Eugene—and then look at what is possible. Eugene is on I-5, so how would we get to 101? Looking at the Oregon portion of the trip, there are two seemingly reasonable ways to get to Highway 101 on the coast. We can go directly to Florence, or head down Highway 5 to Grant’s Pass and then take the little red road to Crescent City in the extreme northwest corner of California.

So let’s compare these two segments. Open yet another MapQuest window by right-clicking on "New Directions," and let’s see what MapQuest has to offer about a trip from Eugene, Oregon, to Crescent City, California (Figure 1-11).

Interesting! MapQuest picks the interstate for the majority of the trip. The alternative from Eugene - Florence - Crescent City is ignored.

Using Estimated Time

A note on Estimated Time and using trip segments to get an idea of the heinousness of a route: everyone has a different idea of how long a trip will take, and none of the estimates are "correct." In this case, MapQuest is suggesting an average speed of about 56 mph for the whole leg (223 miles divided by 239 minutes times 60 minutes per hour = 56 miles per hour). Breaking that down, it is 58 mph for the I-5 portion.

I know that I can drive faster on the interstate, but does that mean I’ll get there sooner? Who knows! I have a new camera and I’m snap-happy. Maybe we’ll stop every 10 miles on either route. Perhaps there is an interesting museum right off the interstate. MapQuest can’t tell us what we’ll do, but using their idea of travel time and average speed will help us out. See "Will the Kids Barf?" [Hack #7] to get another trick to use with MapQuest.