Day: April 13, 2020

I spend a rainy afternoon making some pleasing and surprising progress on my “map server” architecture that is one of my chief hobbies.
One thing I want to be able to do is to eventually create and host my own “contour” (elevation) data for my geofictional places. Currently, this contour work is hosted at the OGF website, e.g. my island called Tárrases (link to the contour map). I want to be able to host this type of map on my own server.
It’s quite intricate to use raw GIS (geographic information services) data to “draw” one’s own digital contour maps.
As a first step, I have imported the raw data for a small corner of my home in Southeast Alaska to my server. This is digitized planetary height data, freely available from the NASA website. After nearly 3 months of on-and-off effort, I have finally managed to render (draw) the contour map, using the OpenTopoMap architecture (a Mapnik render architecture). Note that this really is only contour data – I didn’t import the other real-world map data, and in fact only placed a few of my own invented towns, such as the towns called “Rock” and “Tree” on the map. The town of “Rock” is out at northern tip of Noyes Island, where Arthur likes to go fishing. It’s a rocky little cape. The town of “Tree” is my home, of course.
Here is a link to the current server, but I’ll include a screenshot below, since the link might end up evolving or changing as I continue refining this effort. You can click that screenshot to enlarge it.