All – Page 41 – GISforThought

Trans Siberian GeoJson on GitHub

One of the easiest and low-cost ways of getting your data online is by using GitHub. While mainly aimed for code, it can be used for other things as well.

A great feature is the rendering of .geojson files as maps automatically.

I have a .geojson file of a Trans-Siberian journey in WGS84 (currently the only supported projection). I copy and past this to gist.GitHub.com and name the file TransSiberianSimplified.geojson (I think lowercase is important in the file type). It is then automatically turned into a slippy map. This can then be embedded (for WordPress I have done this by creating a simple html page which simply contains the relevant script, and embedded it using an iframe plugin).

Mapping With WMS – SNH – John Muir Way

While Web Mapping Services (WMS) are becoming more common, their functionality is limited. They are easier to set up and run than a Web Feature Service (WFS) but are mainly useful for pre-rendered or background mapping.

Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) provide an extensive amount of datasets as WMS, through their Natural Spaces data store.

I thought it would be interesting to see what kind of result could be achieved using only WMS.

The result is a map of the John Muir Way, which is a long distance walking route in the central belt of Scotland. Apart from the way itself (it was not provided through the WMS), all data is obtained through the SNH WMS. Some styling could be done using the colorize and layer blending options in QGIS.