Anything For A Map - Part 0

On The Heels of The Pioneer Corps

Mapping the footprints of the men who faced the thicket, built drifts across rivers, played the debut soccer and rugby matches in a country.

Background

Laager

I am enthused by maps and more so good cartography. I will scrounge any document just to map the two or more places mentioned there. Perchance while working with an old topomap of Zimbabwe, I bumped into small crosses that represented features of historic significance. Of special intrigue were locations identified as Fort and Laager (pictured above). As I Google-dug some more on these, I came across an article, Pioneer Forts in Rhodesia 1890-1897. My interest grew as I read a gripping account by Horste.(The Historic Publication) He chronicles how in 1890, the Pioneer Column’s escort of British South Africa Company’s Police progressed into present day Zimbabwe. I had read and heard about this in my history classes, that was then, I am all maps now!

BUSY ?:~ Cut To The Chase.***

Why?

Get There Fast


1. Vector Data Preparation
2. Raster Data Preparation
3. Map Creation
4. Map Serving
5. Challenges/ Observations
6. Results

My conception of the map was a route, points and relief map that stood out, with a subtle backdrop of existing roads and features. I had bumped into carto works with tilemill, in particular Toner. I had to ‘broad-read’ on various carto projects. For starters, I had an undated, georeferenced 1:250 000 topography map of Zimbabwe(Rhodesia). I opened a blank QGIS project, which had the following CRS settings. This was the basis of other work to follow: QGIS CRS

1. Vector Data Preparation

Key Points
Route Plotting
Route Buffer

2. Raster Data Preparation

I am a fan of relief maps. I could just spend hours just panning a good representation of terrain so this stage would give me great pleasure! For this section I intended to follow these tutorials - Working with terrain data and Using TileMill’s raster-colorizer. I however ended up emulating this in QGIS. Which gave excellent results! Relief In QGIS

Relief Map

Just for fun, I loaded the three elevation data files (tifs) created above into QGIS and styled them with the transparencies indicated in the Tilemill tutorial, viz colour_relief: 10% transparent, hillshade: 60%,slopeshade: 40%. The result was astounding!

3. Map Creation

Osm Toner

To provide cartographic contrast and temporal context I wanted a subtle background and osm toner seemed the best choice. The procedure is outlined succinctly here.

More Styling in Tilemill

Exporting The Mapwork

This stage was the most exciting for me - who doesn’t want to see the fruit of their labour?! TileMill gives you a preview of what the export will be like in the WYSIWYG manner so there’s no crossing of fingers to what the output will be like, just a demand for patience as the export runs.

After two unsuccessfully runs I had to explicitly define the RCS for all the layers in my project.(those were set to Auto-Detect). I defined my export parameters - MBTiles, Bounds, Centre - saw the software estimated 8 hours to completion of the run. Luckily it was night so I went for some shut-eye.

Come morning there was my 237MB MBTiles file!

I fired up QGIS to take a look. I recalled QGIS supported these. The result was not so impressive - had a grainy feel to it. TileMill had rendered it smoothly so I knew it was not my data. I remembered a Portable MBTiles viewer. I couldn’t quite recall the name to I consulted my GitHub account (anything I think might be of interest to me I put on the Watch list ) - there it was TileStream Portable.

I loaded my MBTiles per instruction and my pannable map ….

TileStream Map

So one can actually give a friend, client a pannable map on a USB Stick loaded with the MBTiles being served by the TileStream Portable. (*I’ve read on the inter-web companied serving imagery as MBTiles *)

4. Map Serving

*I will not go into detail describing step-by-step this part of my exercise as it detracts from the intention of this blog post. Summary will only be given since with Stage 3 above, the Mapping exercise would be complete.

How-to serve the resultant map was largely inspired by the following blog post which I emulated closely - Setting up a Cloud MBTiles Server with Benchmarks (You can also find the screencast in my Github Repo).

Leaflet was used as the Mapping Client. I had had a historic stint with The Bootleaf Template and I started there - with a clone of that repository. I spend considerable time in SublimeText 3 editing the template to suit my needs.

5. Challenges/ Observations

Some points to note in the representation of wok done here:

6. Results

I have served all the data relating to this project to a GitHub repository.

You can link directly to the resultant map here - The Pioneer Column Map

#postscript