This year I wasn’t really sure I would take part, as I had no plans and nothing prepared. But it is a great challenge. It challenges your creativity, problem solving, and map making skills. It also sets a time limit so you don’t have to worry about being perfect. And making maps is good fun.
There were a few datasets that I had come across that I thought would be good subjects, and I got a lot of mileage out of them.
Dublin neighbourhoods
These included the Dublin Inquirer neighbourhood survey.
I think this is a great initiative, and hopefully they get a real large set of responses. They are at over 2000 already so a great start.
I did something similar for Glasgow (here) but only got 367 responses in total. So the power of having a well read paper behind the initiative is great. They are also reaching out to areas that have not had many responses, which is really great work.
OpenStreetMap
I also wanted to do some maps around OpenStreetMap in Ireland. The community here has had a large push to map all of the buildings in Ireland, which has progressed well.
Supermac’s is an Irish fast food restaurant chain, who have had a few trademark disputes over the years with McDonald’s over the use of Mc and Mac in burger names.
3D:
This turned out a lot better than I expected.
Was pure QGIS. Create grid (5km x 5km), zonal statistics on CORINE (Majority) and DEM (Median). New field for height rounded up to the nearest 40:
to_int(ceil((“_h_median” / 40))) * 40
Set colors. Create centroids with same colors. These become the Lego nubs.
Rendered in QGIS2threejs plugin. The grid is extruded, with a height of height * 50. The centroids are cylinder rendered height * 50 + 30 * 50, so they come a bit higher, radius of 1800.
Might be better to not use landuse, but elevation for the colours.
No Computer:
Nice to get away from the computer. Definitely promotes some creativity. But I just took it as an opportunity to walk on the beach.
Land:
My favourite of my maps.
Land use vineyard across Europe from CORINE 2020, with the major regions labelled.
GHSL:
Seasonal population of the Balearic Islands.
Data clipping in QGIS/GDAL, rendered in Aerialod, with labels with GIMP afterwards.
This was my second favourite of my maps. I think the topic is interesting and the execution is pretty good. Was however quite manual and probably needed more exaggeration to see the differences.
Historical:
A time lapse of 1,831,044 buildings in Ireland being added to OpenStreetMap.
Save as a text file ending in .xml like qgis_scales.xml
These are the scales OpenStreetMap tiles are rendered in for 96 dpi, so the map will look sharp on most monitors. These are the scales for the zoom levels.
The xml file can then be loaded into the project from:
Due to GDPR, you will have to log in with an OSM id to download the full history extracts. User ID’s are personal data.
Process:
The workflow is pretty simple. Osmium-tools provides pretty easy API access to the history files, where you can provide a data, and it will extract what OSM was like at that date. We simply need to loop through the desired dates we want to extract, and pipe the results into a workflow that loads the data into PostgreSQL. The final step is simply rendering in QGIS using the time manager plugin.