7 ms·

I studied geography for about eight years in university and something that drove me kinda mad is how cartographic authoring tools were more like CAD software th

I studied geography for about eight years in university and something that drove me kinda mad is how cartographic authoring tools were more like CAD software than they were like video games (I once had a short rant over dinner with the President of ESRI Canada about how my GPU is built for rendering geometries and ArcGIS ignores its existence). On the surface, the CAD pedigree makes sense. But… why aren’t more tools like video games? Make it super easy for anyone to start getting involved. I remember all the gatekeeping-like discussion in “Public Participation GIS” seminars: you’ve gotta be an expert to author good data because there’s so many ways to do it wrong. Blah. No. One of my daydreams if I get FU money is to make an incredibly user friendly set of web based analytical GIS tools. Not just the basics like buffering and queries, but the entire spatial toolbox to build data processing pipelines. I want a layperson to be able to ask “where should I buy a house if I care about these four parameters?” (and for it to not be a hidden magic purpose built portal on some realtor website) The immediate retort from my internal pessimist is “the data isn’t available or isn’t consistent“ but I don’t buy that anymore. I remember having to go ask nicely to obtain shapefiles from my city. Decades later it’s all just online. And the community can help catalog data sources, add metadata about transforming them to standard schemas, and sharing data pipelines with the community in some sort of catalog. I really think it’s a UX problem above all else.

dark-star 4y ago
The StreetComplete app for Android is a bit like a game and helps update "trivial" tagging tasks on OSM. I used it a bit while cycling around my hometown. Simply stop, see what you can tag/update, and continue cycling. There should be more of these simple apps like that
- Doctor_Fegg 4y ago
  Every Door is really good too (it's Flutter, so iOS/Android). I polished off a shopping centre near here in record time with it.
  - raybb 4y ago
    Links to mentioned apps: https://every-door.app/ https://every-door.app/ https://streetcomplete.app/ https://streetcomplete.app/
joelfooxj 4y ago
RE: Canadian GIS data. I thought it was really cool that most Canadian cities offer LIDAR scans for download by the public
agumonkey 4y ago
gamification of things is discussed, but it's still not discussed enough (one could even argue that we could reach back to pedagogics ala piaget). that said there's one aspect about gamification is that it often stops working when information requires deep thinking but it might still be fixable i'd love to make everything game like, society as a whole would benefit from it (it could even save energy)
- pietervdvn 4y ago
  The reason that I haven't pursued a gamification approach with https://mapcomplete.osm.be https://mapcomplete.osm.be is twofold: - I'm focusing on other usability issues (and features) first - I'm worried that "mapping for points" instead of "mapping to have a good map/help the community/map what the contributor needs" will result in lower data quality. Before implementing such a thing, this should be thoroughly studied
  - agumonkey 4y ago
    True, and even the idea of "points" might be shallow gamification. Creating fun incentives might (I'm now knowledgeable, I'm just a person and I know the power of fun in learning and working) come in other clothes. Good luck :)
jandrewrogers 4y ago
A root cause of the problem you've identified is that the tools are designed to offer first-class support for cartographic applications that pre-date the use of computers. Almost none of this has any relevance to modern geospatial analytics but it pervades the way the software works. Users that just want to build a modern analytic application are still forced to deal with this legacy baggage even though it provides no value to them and often makes their applications worse. The learning curve is unnecessarily steep. Like you, I am of the opinion that a new set of GIS tools that focus solely on the needs of modern geospatial analysis users would be amazing. Another gap is that cartographic tools have a deep assumption that geometry does not move. They don't provide support for correctly reasoning about spatiotemporal relationships, which are pretty important in modern geospatial applications.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  Your last paragraph resonates strongly with me. I’ve taken my GIS skills and applied it to mobile robotics and performance often falls off a cliff when the moving elements aren’t treated very carefully. OpenLayers and the rest do a great job these days, though. But a lot of the APIs are clearly intended for set and forget. “Why would you want to update this at 60hz?” I hear it asking me.
- tccole 4y ago
  Isn’t that the point of Carto?
- glompers 4y ago
  Good post. I haven't used Carto, Every Door, nor StreetComplete, but some of the consistency and non-ESRI-ness that OP is seeking seems to me to be present in Regrid fka Landgrid: https://regrid.com/why-regrid https://regrid.com/why-regrid
tpxl 4y ago
> where should I buy a house if I care about these four parameters? A lot of this data exists, and is freely available. I used to work for a startup where we tried to accurately predict the amount of sun a particular plot of land would get. You can pretty much get a 3d map of the world with 5m accuracy (or even more granular, but the datasets get ridiculously big at that point), then render a 360° view from any location in the world and simulate the sun movement. You can even get 3d models of some cities to take buildings into account (the earth model is ground only). The startup eventually failed for Covid reasons. Satellite data is available for most of the world for things like wind speed, cloudiness, vegetation, ... If you live in a decent country you may be able to freely get data for zoning, power lines, internet, building density, public transport... You can build a really good dataset to evaluate a particular plot of land if you combine all this data. Anyway, hit me up if you ever get that FU money, because I'd also like to do something like this :)
- paganel 4y ago
  > You can pretty much get a 3d map of the world with 5m accuracy ( Related, maybe OT, but you seem a person that knows a lot more about this than I would know: more exactly I wanted to ask you if you know of a decent enough method to get the height of a building based on GoogleStreetView. Meaning, I'm "inside" GoogleStreetView, I'm looking at a "building" from outside on the street, I know the geo coordinates of the camera that took the photo, I know the geo coordinates of the building, so that I know the distance between the photo camera and the building, I can "count" (for lack of a better word) the building's size in screen pixels (or some other unit/reference? which one?), and based on all that I'm curious if one can get the real height in meters of said building. From what I could found around on some other forums there were people mentioning the aperture of the GoogleStreetView photo camera being part of the "equation" to compute it all, and that would be a problem because we do not know the values for the aperture. I have no idea though if all that discussion was on the subject or not.
  - Waterluvian 4y ago
    The images need to be rectified or else, yes, the lens distortion messes up the measurements. Really you just need a length and an angle to complete the triangle. The length is easy: measure distance from base of building to any point where you know the angle. But getting the angle from a point to the top of the building is tricky. I don’t know if any clever way to estimate that without stereo imagery. A lot of this stuff is automatically calculated when a digital surface model (DSM) is generated from stereo pairs of images. So you might be able to just look it up in Google Earth. This is the data (probably blended with many other sources such as LiDAR and ground survey data) Google uses to extrude buildings into 3D models. P.S. this was an assignment in 1st year for me. Estimate the height of the CN Tower from some aerial photos. I feel like I should remember more.
tracker1 4y ago
I have thought it would be cool to send in swarms of connected drones to do more detailed maps of national parks, with images... First time I thought about it was in the petrified forest in AZ. That it would be cool to actually (virtually) see more than just the path you weren't supposed to leave. But could apply to many things... lots of cameras, sensors and pictures.
The5thElephant 4y ago
You might be interested in what they are building at http://felt.com/ http://felt.com/ they have a lot of great data sets already built in and it can handle imports of all kinds of mapping data. Not for actually updating the core data of maps, but seems like the tool to address the UX of mapping multiple types of data and presenting or exploring it.
otoburb 4y ago
>>One of my daydreams if I get FU money [...] Is this a situation where an alternate path could be a non-profit foundation soliciting donations and grants to get started? Also, aren't there a new crop of GIS startups that were funded in the most recent funding cycle, or are they also experiencing "truncated runway" syndrome?
NoboruWataya 4y ago
In addition to StreetComplete which others have mentioned, one of the lightning talks at FOSDEM this year was about a project called CoffeOSM, which allows you to scan your receipt from a coffee shop and add the shop to OSM.[0] It's still just a proof of concept, but hopefully it develops into something more as it's a very cool idea IMO. [0] https://gitlab.com/netvandal/coffeosm https://gitlab.com/netvandal/coffeosm
larsiusprime 4y ago
Seen Felt.com? What do you think?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
brylie 4y ago
Woah, your vision sounds very similar to the goals of an open-source web app I started building a few years ago. https://github.com/SustainableUrbanDesign/app https://github.com/SustainableUrbanDesign/app The idea was inspired by Cities Skylines but I started with a 2D approach since everything is much simpler than with 3D. The idea was to help urban planners fill sustainability gaps in their cities by showing which areas needed access to amenities like bus stops, daycare, grocery stores, and schools. The approach, as mentioned is to overlay buffers surrounding existing amenities, dissolve those buffers, and find gaps. There can even be an interactive component to show the impact of placing an amenity in a neighborhood, like those emojis that radiate outward when placing a public service in Cities Skylines. The inverse problem can easily be accommodated with the app, helping people find desirable neighborhoods for their next home. I'd be glad to jumpstart the open-source project if I can find any contributors to help build the project.
MrLeap 4y ago
I'd love to work on something like this, maybe after I finish the text editor game I've been making for a few years.
atoav 4y ago
My guess beyond pure historical baggage is that it is hard to produce user experiences that are simple, powerful and produce consistent data at the same time. Also, niche software will always be worse than top notch game UX. Games work because they often gradually ramp the difficulty of the problems and the applied solutions up in a very controlled way using tutorial levels, clever world design etc. This means you learn the thing without even thinking you learn it. It would definitly be possible to do such a thing in a GIS tool and have the user do some fictional work first until they reached a certain level of proviciency and then throw them at the real data. But without tutorializing either you trust the user and give them powerful and simple tools and live with the broken data they produce (akin to button mashing in a fighting game) or you restrict the data that can be produced and frustrate the users because they cannot get the things done they want to get done. In the end the quality of UX is always a money thing. A game with bad UX won't sell. A niche GIS software coded by three racoons in a trenchcoat will sell, even of the UX is from the stone age — as long as all other GIS tools are on a similar level.
- pietervdvn 4y ago
  This is something that I'm doing with MapComplete - certain features are 'unlocked' when a certain number of changes has been reached (e.g. when the contributor has >25 changesets, the tags of the data are shown)

dark-star 4y ago

The StreetComplete app for Android is a bit like a game and helps update "trivial" tagging tasks on OSM. I used it a bit while cycling around my hometown. Simply stop, see what you can tag/update, and continue cycling. There should be more of these simple apps like that

Doctor_Fegg 4y ago
Every Door is really good too (it's Flutter, so iOS/Android). I polished off a shopping centre near here in record time with it.
- raybb 4y ago
  Links to mentioned apps: https://every-door.app/ https://every-door.app/ https://streetcomplete.app/ https://streetcomplete.app/

joelfooxj 4y ago

RE: Canadian GIS data. I thought it was really cool that most Canadian cities offer LIDAR scans for download by the public

agumonkey 4y ago

gamification of things is discussed, but it's still not discussed enough (one could even argue that we could reach back to pedagogics ala piaget). that said there's one aspect about gamification is that it often stops working when information requires deep thinking but it might still be fixable i'd love to make everything game like, society as a whole would benefit from it (it could even save energy)

pietervdvn 4y ago
The reason that I haven't pursued a gamification approach with https://mapcomplete.osm.be https://mapcomplete.osm.be is twofold: - I'm focusing on other usability issues (and features) first - I'm worried that "mapping for points" instead of "mapping to have a good map/help the community/map what the contributor needs" will result in lower data quality. Before implementing such a thing, this should be thoroughly studied
- agumonkey 4y ago
  True, and even the idea of "points" might be shallow gamification. Creating fun incentives might (I'm now knowledgeable, I'm just a person and I know the power of fun in learning and working) come in other clothes. Good luck :)

jandrewrogers 4y ago

A root cause of the problem you've identified is that the tools are designed to offer first-class support for cartographic applications that pre-date the use of computers. Almost none of this has any relevance to modern geospatial analytics but it pervades the way the software works. Users that just want to build a modern analytic application are still forced to deal with this legacy baggage even though it provides no value to them and often makes their applications worse. The learning curve is unnecessarily steep. Like you, I am of the opinion that a new set of GIS tools that focus solely on the needs of modern geospatial analysis users would be amazing. Another gap is that cartographic tools have a deep assumption that geometry does not move. They don't provide support for correctly reasoning about spatiotemporal relationships, which are pretty important in modern geospatial applications.

Waterluvian 4y ago
Your last paragraph resonates strongly with me. I’ve taken my GIS skills and applied it to mobile robotics and performance often falls off a cliff when the moving elements aren’t treated very carefully. OpenLayers and the rest do a great job these days, though. But a lot of the APIs are clearly intended for set and forget. “Why would you want to update this at 60hz?” I hear it asking me.
tccole 4y ago
Isn’t that the point of Carto?
glompers 4y ago
Good post. I haven't used Carto, Every Door, nor StreetComplete, but some of the consistency and non-ESRI-ness that OP is seeking seems to me to be present in Regrid fka Landgrid: https://regrid.com/why-regrid https://regrid.com/why-regrid

tpxl 4y ago

> where should I buy a house if I care about these four parameters? A lot of this data exists, and is freely available. I used to work for a startup where we tried to accurately predict the amount of sun a particular plot of land would get. You can pretty much get a 3d map of the world with 5m accuracy (or even more granular, but the datasets get ridiculously big at that point), then render a 360° view from any location in the world and simulate the sun movement. You can even get 3d models of some cities to take buildings into account (the earth model is ground only). The startup eventually failed for Covid reasons. Satellite data is available for most of the world for things like wind speed, cloudiness, vegetation, ... If you live in a decent country you may be able to freely get data for zoning, power lines, internet, building density, public transport... You can build a really good dataset to evaluate a particular plot of land if you combine all this data. Anyway, hit me up if you ever get that FU money, because I'd also like to do something like this :)

paganel 4y ago
> You can pretty much get a 3d map of the world with 5m accuracy ( Related, maybe OT, but you seem a person that knows a lot more about this than I would know: more exactly I wanted to ask you if you know of a decent enough method to get the height of a building based on GoogleStreetView. Meaning, I'm "inside" GoogleStreetView, I'm looking at a "building" from outside on the street, I know the geo coordinates of the camera that took the photo, I know the geo coordinates of the building, so that I know the distance between the photo camera and the building, I can "count" (for lack of a better word) the building's size in screen pixels (or some other unit/reference? which one?), and based on all that I'm curious if one can get the real height in meters of said building. From what I could found around on some other forums there were people mentioning the aperture of the GoogleStreetView photo camera being part of the "equation" to compute it all, and that would be a problem because we do not know the values for the aperture. I have no idea though if all that discussion was on the subject or not.
- Waterluvian 4y ago
  The images need to be rectified or else, yes, the lens distortion messes up the measurements. Really you just need a length and an angle to complete the triangle. The length is easy: measure distance from base of building to any point where you know the angle. But getting the angle from a point to the top of the building is tricky. I don’t know if any clever way to estimate that without stereo imagery. A lot of this stuff is automatically calculated when a digital surface model (DSM) is generated from stereo pairs of images. So you might be able to just look it up in Google Earth. This is the data (probably blended with many other sources such as LiDAR and ground survey data) Google uses to extrude buildings into 3D models. P.S. this was an assignment in 1st year for me. Estimate the height of the CN Tower from some aerial photos. I feel like I should remember more.

tracker1 4y ago

I have thought it would be cool to send in swarms of connected drones to do more detailed maps of national parks, with images... First time I thought about it was in the petrified forest in AZ. That it would be cool to actually (virtually) see more than just the path you weren't supposed to leave. But could apply to many things... lots of cameras, sensors and pictures.

The5thElephant 4y ago

You might be interested in what they are building at http://felt.com/ http://felt.com/ they have a lot of great data sets already built in and it can handle imports of all kinds of mapping data. Not for actually updating the core data of maps, but seems like the tool to address the UX of mapping multiple types of data and presenting or exploring it.

otoburb 4y ago

>>One of my daydreams if I get FU money [...] Is this a situation where an alternate path could be a non-profit foundation soliciting donations and grants to get started? Also, aren't there a new crop of GIS startups that were funded in the most recent funding cycle, or are they also experiencing "truncated runway" syndrome?

NoboruWataya 4y ago

In addition to StreetComplete which others have mentioned, one of the lightning talks at FOSDEM this year was about a project called CoffeOSM, which allows you to scan your receipt from a coffee shop and add the shop to OSM.[0] It's still just a proof of concept, but hopefully it develops into something more as it's a very cool idea IMO. [0] https://gitlab.com/netvandal/coffeosm https://gitlab.com/netvandal/coffeosm

larsiusprime 4y ago

Seen Felt.com? What do you think?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

brylie 4y ago

Woah, your vision sounds very similar to the goals of an open-source web app I started building a few years ago. https://github.com/SustainableUrbanDesign/app https://github.com/SustainableUrbanDesign/app The idea was inspired by Cities Skylines but I started with a 2D approach since everything is much simpler than with 3D. The idea was to help urban planners fill sustainability gaps in their cities by showing which areas needed access to amenities like bus stops, daycare, grocery stores, and schools. The approach, as mentioned is to overlay buffers surrounding existing amenities, dissolve those buffers, and find gaps. There can even be an interactive component to show the impact of placing an amenity in a neighborhood, like those emojis that radiate outward when placing a public service in Cities Skylines. The inverse problem can easily be accommodated with the app, helping people find desirable neighborhoods for their next home. I'd be glad to jumpstart the open-source project if I can find any contributors to help build the project.

MrLeap 4y ago

I'd love to work on something like this, maybe after I finish the text editor game I've been making for a few years.

atoav 4y ago

My guess beyond pure historical baggage is that it is hard to produce user experiences that are simple, powerful and produce consistent data at the same time. Also, niche software will always be worse than top notch game UX. Games work because they often gradually ramp the difficulty of the problems and the applied solutions up in a very controlled way using tutorial levels, clever world design etc. This means you learn the thing without even thinking you learn it. It would definitly be possible to do such a thing in a GIS tool and have the user do some fictional work first until they reached a certain level of proviciency and then throw them at the real data. But without tutorializing either you trust the user and give them powerful and simple tools and live with the broken data they produce (akin to button mashing in a fighting game) or you restrict the data that can be produced and frustrate the users because they cannot get the things done they want to get done. In the end the quality of UX is always a money thing. A game with bad UX won't sell. A niche GIS software coded by three racoons in a trenchcoat will sell, even of the UX is from the stone age — as long as all other GIS tools are on a similar level.

pietervdvn 4y ago
This is something that I'm doing with MapComplete - certain features are 'unlocked' when a certain number of changes has been reached (e.g. when the contributor has >25 changesets, the tags of the data are shown)