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See also: Maps, Map generator, The polygon map, spacetime DTD, ecoregion DTD

The final aim of the GIS effort is implementing server-side map generation on Wikipedia. But before it's going to be possible, a few useful maps should be created.

[edit] Poland

Size: 600x600

Projection: Equal-area cylindrical

Latitude:56 N - 48 N

Longitude:13 E - 25 E

Background:Blue Marble with quite naive scaling

Marked objects:

National borders

some Polish and foreign important cities, with Polish names

country labels

rivers (importance levels 1 - 3)

Labels are placed using iterative "simulated annealing"-type algorithm. It's working very well for this map. I'm not sure how will it perform on maps with more labels.

projection = equalarea
size       = 600 600
lat        = 56 48
long       = 13 25
out        = map-b19.png
background = bluemarble
rivers
clabels
borders
cities     = data/cities2.pl
locale     = pl

Problems:

Country labels:

They're not rotated when they should be (Germany)

Heuristics for selecting font size don't take string length into account, only country's visible area

Country labels and city labels are completely independent, and it doesn't look as well as it could it places where they overlap

Other labels:

All cities are selected by hand. Maybe some important city on the edge of the map was forgotten.

No label for BaŒtyk Sea, and main mountain ranges

Rivers

Lakes on rivers break them. For example Wisla is broken at Zbiornik GoczaŒkowicki (south from Katowice, near the beginning). It's not terribly ugly with mild colors that are used to paint rivers, but would be on political maps.

Border rivers don't look that bad, but they could be improved. Because of using different data sources sometimes the border river and the border aren't fully aligned.

More data

No administrative divisions of Poland. If anyone has that data (new data, old is useless), please tell about it.

Other

Scaling method used is not optimal, but also my version of BlueMarble doesn't look very good. The problem is that mountains and lakes/river valleys both look the same (very dark). Maybe it's better in some other version of BlueMarble.

The first useful person profiler is the equivalent project to move towards a person DTD.