Unifying Illustrator, TileMill / CartoCSS, and GeoServer

With the release of TileMill 0.10.0, there are a series of new compositing operations available within the CartoCSS language and rendering engine. A brief review of these features seems to open up a world of new potential.

However, I have a problem. I work in an organization where our primary product is a hard-copy map. As we evolve our product line, our challenge is to produce digital, interactive, web-enabled versions of our hard-copy map content and maintain a high-level of cartographic goodness. Our cartographic team works in Adobe Illustrator, and are quite proficient in it.

The problem we face is having to do cartographic work twice in order to switch between Illustrator and the Web. There has to be a better way. We are currently using TileMill for a significant amount of our web rendering, but also intend to transition to GeoServer. This means we have .AI, CartoCSS and .SLD in the mix.

We need to keep Illustrator as our foundation for creating content, so what is the best option to extend to the web? First is the problem of converting from .AI to CartoCSS, specifically the conversion of graphic styles for each Illustrator layer to its CartoCSS equivalent. I’ve never heard of a converter tool for this and am interested to know if anyone (@opengeo @ortelius @mapbox @ericg @tmcw @springmeyer @kelso @mattpriour…anyone at Adobe) has an idea if it is feasible or the amount of effort it would take.

Second is the problem of having to convert .AI to both CartoCSS for TileMill and SLD for GeoServer. The best option would be to have GeoServer consume CartoCSS natively, that way offline tiles and web services could maintain the same cartographic styling.

I posed similar questions on Twitter to @cageyjames and @spara, and @spara’s reply got me thinking whether I was looking at this question the wrong way. Is this too old school to be considering tools like this, so I wanted to know if anyone else had been thinking about it.

Thankfully @mattpriour replied that work was already being planned at OpenGeo to implement CartoCSS for GeoServer. And @godwinsgo also replied that GeoServer already has some form of CSS style rendering. So it looks like the CartoCSS in GeoServer has a chance of being completed, that just leaves the .AI to CartoCSS conversion.

Anyone have any thoughts?

OpenStreetMap Animations

The purpose of this post is to simply collect in one place some of the amazing animations ITO World has produced from the OpenStreetMap database. I am often searching around on Vimeo to find them, so I thought it might be useful to put them here, especially as several new ones have been recently released. These visualizations come across as very professional, they have a high production value and include a good soundtrack. I don’t personally know any of the folks at Ito World, but would love to know what software they use to produce the animations.

US edits to OpenStreetMap 2007-2012 from ItoWorld.

The new animations expand on the popular ‘Year of Edits’ series, this time for 2011 and 2010:

OSM 2011: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld.

OSM 2010: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld.

And a comparison of 4 years of edits:

OSM 4UP: Four Years of Edits 2008-2011 from ItoWorld.

The one I still find the most amazing is the animation depicting the Haiti Earthquake response. I often use this animation to help explain the value of OpenStreetMap and the volunteer mapping community in a disaster response situation. The ‘Imagery to the Crowd‘ concept is a direct result of the Haiti response.

OpenStreetMap – Project Haiti from ItoWorld.

Uganda mapping project

The Humanitarian Information Unit has for the second time worked with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team to deliver high resolution commercial satellite imagery to the crowd. For this project we helped support the American Red Cross with a disaster risk reduction project focused on the citites of Gulu and Lira in northwest Uganda. Details of the project can be found on the Red Cross blog, “We Start With A Good Map” and the recent Red Cross news article “New Mapping Technologies for the Developing World.” One exciting element of this project is that ARC staff are working directly with locals in country on the project and helping to provide additional local knowledge to the map.

The HIU tasked, processed, and served the imagery using its CyberGIS computing infrastructure (more on this coming). The imagery services have been running for a couple weeks and the mapping results are quite stunning. The amount of detail in Gulu surprises me every time I look at it, especially the trees, huts, and buildings. The maps below are interactive and can be used to zoom and pan around the OpenStreetMap data. Details on how to help with the mapping task, or any other mapping task, can be found at the OSM Tasking Server.

Export as KML for Google Earth/Google MapsOpen standalone map in fullscreen modeExport as GeoJSONExport as GeoRSS
Gulu, Uganda

loading map - please wait...

Gulu, Uganda 2.773479, 32.304783 Imagery to the Crowd Project: Gulu, Uganda See the OSM Tasking Manager for details: http://tasks.hotosm.org/job/50 Uganda Mapping Project: DisruptiveGeo blog

Lira appears to be a smaller town, with less overall mapping, but the building mapping is equally detailed.

Export as KML for Google Earth/Google MapsOpen standalone map in fullscreen modeExport as GeoJSONExport as GeoRSS
Lira, Uganda

loading map - please wait...

Lira, Uganda 2.248187, 32.896156 Imagery to the Crowd Project: Lira, Uganda See the OSM Tasking Manager for more details: http://tasks.hotosm.org/job/51 Uganda Mapping Project: DisruptiveGeo blog