[CKAN] TileMill and OpenOakland datasets

Robert Stewart

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Oct 28, 2012, 4:00:21 AM10/28/12

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At our last meeting, Eddie recommended we check out TileMill and MapBox for mapping data sets. TileMill is the awesome. In no time I made it through the online crash course and was mapping datasets from data.openoakland.org.

Angela was interested in seeing a map showing Alameda County Toxic Hazard Sites along with the OUSD Student Asthma data from data.openoakland.org, so I started with that.

http://tiles.mapbox.com/wombatnation/map/oak_toxic_hazard_sites

I also threw in a layer with the 2010 US Census TIGER/Line shapefile for Alameda County subdivisions.

I'd be happy to give a quick demo at the next meeting to anyone who is interested.

Robert

Tony Barreca

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Oct 28, 2012, 1:23:10 PM10/28/12

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Outstanding, Robert! Thanks!

I, for one, would like to take you up on that demo offer.

Robert

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John C. Osborn

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Oct 28, 2012, 2:33:46 PM10/28/12

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Only problem with TileMill and MapBox is that you need to either build a MapBox server to host the maps, or pay to have them hosted on their server. If you want tile-based mapping that's free to use and host, I'd recommend Leaflet.js (http://leafletjs.com/)

Cheers~

John C. Osborn
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Eddie Tejeda

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Oct 28, 2012, 3:06:40 PM10/28/12

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Awesome job Robert!

John, I am a fan of Tilemill, Mapbox, Cloudmade and Leaflet! They are all great tools, projects and services and work well together. You can actually host simple maps on Mapbox or Cloudmade for free…. and then use Leaflet to add interactions using either service.

Lets learn them all.

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John C. Osborn

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Oct 28, 2012, 3:18:48 PM10/28/12

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Good to know!

Robert Stewart

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Oct 28, 2012, 4:08:21 PM10/28/12

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The Minnesota Post used TileMill to generate an mbtiles file (i.e., a SQLite DB file) and then extracted the PNG and JSON files for self hosting with rendering and additional interaction via Wax and Leaflet.

http://www.minnpost.com/data/2012/03/how-we-built-same-day-registration-map

Wax is also from MapBox. It looks like they used Wax to load a JSON file that provides a templatized URL for retrieving the tiles from an AWS instance. While TileStream is designed to be very efficient at serving tiles, it looks like simple HTTP requests to files on a web server also work, as long as the paths to the files are created in the proscribed manner.

Robert

Angela Woodall

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Oct 29, 2012, 1:39:34 AM10/29/12

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I will check it out tomorrow. Awesome!

Marina Kukso

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Oct 29, 2012, 12:04:09 PM10/29/12

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hi everyone,

really enjoying working on tilemill - working at the moment on figuring out how we can use it with some of the oaklandwiki projects that we're putting together.

thanks for sharing,

marina

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Angela Woodall

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Nov 6, 2012, 7:31:49 PM11/6/12

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Sorry it took me a while to check this out. I just got out a beta of an app I have been working on.

I can't make it tonight (Nov. 6) bc I have to cover the elex until 2 a.m. But I will be there next Tuesday for hacknight.

I would be interested in mapping more of the data, in particular the foreclosure data set w others and see what turns up. I will be fairly swamped until next week so it's good timing if anyone wants to sit down together next Tuesday.