At Boundless, we put together a nice and subtle world-wide basemap for our new product: Versio. It’s meant to be a basemap that shows you where your data is but doesn’t get in the way, thus the quiet color scheme coupled with ample data from OpenStreetMap.
A stitched together series of screenshots at about zoom level 14 in the San Francisco region provided a good entry for the 2015 GeoHipster Calendar and I’m pleased to announce that it has made the cover.
While I was the main designer for the map, we all know that cartography is only as good as its underlying data, and in the case of dynamic maps, as good as its underlying infrastructure. That’s why the map was really a
team effort by all of the Versio team at Boundless.
A short background on the map in case you’re interested: we used imposm3 to obtain a world-wide OpenStreetMap dataset with a customized mapping.json file that allowed us to get some generalized data for roads and things for the lower zoom levels while still getting the non-generalized data for the higher zooms. We also used quite a bit of NaturalEarth data for the lower zooms, including a raster hillshade for the ocean overlaid with a semi-transparent ocean layer to make it more subdued. Most of the labels are not cached, they are dynamic so that we don’t have any issues with double labels or labels cut off at tile edges. Because we aren’t using too many labels in the dynamic label layer, this doesn’t seem to affect performance. The map was made with most of the OpenGeoSuite components, including–yes, I’ll say it–SLDs that I basically edited by hand. GeoServer serves up the data + SLDs, PostGIS holds the OSM data, the NaturalEarth data are kept in shapefile format, geowebcache cuts the tiles, and OpenLayers shows them off on the webmap.
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