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This is the level of projects that our GIS students deliver at the end of 60 hours of non-mandatory class. Perhaps 70%+ of visitors of HN can do it if they deci

by larodi 2y ago

This is the level of projects that our GIS students deliver at the end of 60 hours of non-mandatory class. Perhaps 70%+ of visitors of HN can do it if they decide to, it is just an interdisciplinary area that not many explore. A project of similar complexity in the WEB or ML are would never get upvoted so much.

Capricorn2481 2y ago
Is this not a project in the web? Or what would be a web project of similar complexity?
matsemann 2y ago
What is your point? That it's "undeserved" and that's bad somehow? I think it was a cool visualization and fun to see. And still, 60 hours of research is more than I would put into it, so even if I technically was able to I would've never gotten around to actually do it. So nice to see something else than what I normally work with, even if it might be trivial in that domain.
- larodi 2y ago
  My point was that HN glorifies things it does not understand well, purely on aesthetic grounds. While real breakthroughs very often goes unnoticed. Its a bias. And struggling to find truth we should try to eliminate biases, we should first learn to see dem. Downvoting a comment which points out a very apparent bias is indeed just another testament to this ignorance. It is super ignoring to also downvote comment of actual geomatics practitioner and a teacher. It is sad if not else. The comment had zero judging whether is fair or deserved to get stupid points on some investor news site. I would love to see other aesthetic projects featured. But in all honesty - perhaps a GPT will get it right from the first time.
aembleton 2y ago
Are there are any tools that your GIS students use to create this? Or is it all code? Any libraries that you can recommend? I was thinking that I would query the global database for roads and then take the nodes and their coordinates. Then I would need to convert those coordinates into points on a canvas and draw lines between them. How would I get the boundaries of a city? Some places I've tried are just a point in osm. Is there some other data source you would use for that?
- cpa 2y ago
  A combination of overpass turbo and a LLM would get you started pretty quick. Regarding GIS tools, download QGis (it sucks on mac but is okay on linux or windows)
  - larodi 2y ago
    QGIS on many platforms for the fact that - its 1 CPU-bound, does not facilitate Spatial SQL and does not partition data when loading so-called attribute tables. Literally not useful for layers with more than 500k features. Already addressed many times in their issues on github, the short answer is - it will take ages to rewrite it. It is perhaps too much to say, but QGIS is a dead-end for GIS systems in its current form. Russians branched 2.x into something called NextGIS btw.
- larodi 2y ago
  PostGIS with some middleware and Leaflet is more than enough. The rest is integration of data. OSM is for data, the visualisation lib that is easiest to get right is the Leaflet. You can of course also use OpenLayers. Most layers on this project are perhaps freely available already. If you need to map objects - QGIS is a free tool and there are plenty of segmentation algos. MMQGIS can geocode datapoints scratched from APIfy. Btw, those who downvoted my comment must be really ignorant about the area of GIS. I find no other explainarion.

by larodi 2y ago

Capricorn2481 2y ago

Is this not a project in the web? Or what would be a web project of similar complexity?

matsemann 2y ago

What is your point? That it's "undeserved" and that's bad somehow? I think it was a cool visualization and fun to see. And still, 60 hours of research is more than I would put into it, so even if I technically was able to I would've never gotten around to actually do it. So nice to see something else than what I normally work with, even if it might be trivial in that domain.

larodi 2y ago
My point was that HN glorifies things it does not understand well, purely on aesthetic grounds. While real breakthroughs very often goes unnoticed. Its a bias. And struggling to find truth we should try to eliminate biases, we should first learn to see dem. Downvoting a comment which points out a very apparent bias is indeed just another testament to this ignorance. It is super ignoring to also downvote comment of actual geomatics practitioner and a teacher. It is sad if not else. The comment had zero judging whether is fair or deserved to get stupid points on some investor news site. I would love to see other aesthetic projects featured. But in all honesty - perhaps a GPT will get it right from the first time.

aembleton 2y ago

Are there are any tools that your GIS students use to create this? Or is it all code? Any libraries that you can recommend? I was thinking that I would query the global database for roads and then take the nodes and their coordinates. Then I would need to convert those coordinates into points on a canvas and draw lines between them. How would I get the boundaries of a city? Some places I've tried are just a point in osm. Is there some other data source you would use for that?

cpa 2y ago
A combination of overpass turbo and a LLM would get you started pretty quick. Regarding GIS tools, download QGis (it sucks on mac but is okay on linux or windows)
- larodi 2y ago
  QGIS on many platforms for the fact that - its 1 CPU-bound, does not facilitate Spatial SQL and does not partition data when loading so-called attribute tables. Literally not useful for layers with more than 500k features. Already addressed many times in their issues on github, the short answer is - it will take ages to rewrite it. It is perhaps too much to say, but QGIS is a dead-end for GIS systems in its current form. Russians branched 2.x into something called NextGIS btw.
larodi 2y ago
PostGIS with some middleware and Leaflet is more than enough. The rest is integration of data. OSM is for data, the visualisation lib that is easiest to get right is the Leaflet. You can of course also use OpenLayers. Most layers on this project are perhaps freely available already. If you need to map objects - QGIS is a free tool and there are plenty of segmentation algos. MMQGIS can geocode datapoints scratched from APIfy. Btw, those who downvoted my comment must be really ignorant about the area of GIS. I find no other explainarion.