Recently I’ve been spending some more time working on generated transit maps. For those I need some “ground truth” – like, I need to know where the land is, where the cities are, where there are lakes and forests, and so on, since I’d like to be able to draw those on the transit maps.
Luckily there is a source for that kind of information, Open Street Maps. They have super detailed maps of Denmark and they’re all open data. The downside is that the data is a little hard to access so I’ve had to spend a fair amount of time massaging, manipulating, converting, the OSM data to get something I can use to draw my maps. I’m pretty much done with that now though. The images above give some examples. The first is the OSM viewer showing Region Nordjylland in its viewer. The second is an image I’ve created based on the data I’ve extracted. The third is a lake near where I live, the fourth is an image I’ve created that includes all lakes in all of Denmark.
The point is, now I have all this data and it’s in a format that I can work with. The next step is to build maps using it but I’ll probably put this effort on hold for a little bit since I might switch my focus to some simpler, more low-hanging, changes I’d like to make to the UI.
