I'm a Geography & Environmental Science student attending UMBC in Maryland. I've been a Wikipedia reader and editor since late 2001.

This summer, I'm trying to migrate some skills in ArcMap/Illustrator over to QGIS/Inkscape, and the Map Workshops seem to be an efficient way to practice. All map work listed here for me to keep track of. A portfolio of non-trivial cartography will come later after I'm a bit more familiar with wikipedia-specific conventions, tools, correctly-licensed data, etc.

Summer Map Blog

• Every day of using QGIS makes ArcGIS look better and better. I'm thinking about exploring the rest of the OSGeo universe, because there are a hell of a lot of crashes, sloppy UI decisions, and missing features here, to say nothing of the mediocre to horrific rendering performance. Perhaps SOP should be to mix and match to achieve the necessary functions. Natural Earth Data, it turns out, has a great set of level 1 administrative boundaries at 1:10m, though they're in need of a geometry repair or two (fixed here).

• Stackoverflow for GIS looks like a good way of building a GIS knowledgebase, particularly since the users who are attracted to the native format have a tendency to accumulate answers in the community wiki.

• Natural Earth Data seems to be a great choice for public domain earth-scale and country-scale maps, as long as you either don't need level 1 administrative boundaries, or can get them elsewhere.

• Vmap0 (née Digital Chart of the World) appears to be the main PD worldwide dataset previous to NED being released, and while it's more comprehensive and mostly public domain, the most useful part was the boundary data, which has a disclaimer tying it to ESRI's copyrighted 1998 data CD set and restricting use. As it's in a vintage file-format, I'm thinking that stripping out the restricted stuff and distributing shapefiles through Bittorrent wouldn't be a bad idea when I get the time.

• Theoretically, geospatial data is data, and such 'facts' are not copyrightable - the creative work is the generalization, presentation and layout of a map. Like many aspects of IP however, the US has left the legislation to litigators & judges with no consensus interest in creating a resilient legal doctrine that's resistant to corporate overreach, so the lawyer has the longest billable hours wins. It's a constant reminder that copyright law is impossible to strictly uphold in the internet age - but I'll end up giving myself headaches being hyperconservative about open licenses here regardless.

• Inkscape really needs a better layer dialog that lists objects. I'm curious as to whether there are better GUI metaphors available than Illustrator's in this matter.

Summer Map Projects

Several of the posts on Map Workshop have suggested WikiMapProjects, which I may end up doing when I have the time. With GIS usually once you've got a dataset and format together it's not time-consuming at all to do repetitive work on similar objects. Here's some things I'll be getting around to in spare time.

US Ancestry Percentage by County for each reported Census Ancestry

The lead for this came from a request for a legend on the Scottish page. Most of the current maps use a Census web tool that creates aesthetically lacking results and no legend. The exceptions use a copyrighted professionally-made map. I have data for these, I just need to find the time to put them all together.

Tamil Nadu State Highways

There are 200 or so state highways in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. A map request for one, and a note that the person will be creating a database, begs for an authoritative map that one can subset. OSM fails hard here with only 14 numbered highways labelled as such. An award-winning 2006 small-scale map of major National Highways in India, which has spawned many subset maps that highlight a route, is no help here - not even for the national highways. In addition, since the National Highways had all of their numbers changed a few months ago, the world is in need of new maps for those as well. It shouldn't be that difficult to digitize these from directions, but so far I only have directions for one of them. I'm still looking for data on state highways, though there is a verbal guide to the NH changes.

Smithsonian National Mall complex map

From Smithsonian_Institution_Building's map request, and looking at the other museums, it looks like the tourist maps that are presented by the bus companies, the Smithsonian, and WMATA don't have a freely licensed counterpart to function as a basic illustrated location map.

User:Kmusser points out a perfectly functional base to work with: File:Washington DC map1.png

Map Portfolio