2013/5/27 Mathieu Stumpf psychoslave@culture-libre.org
Hi, I foward this mail to design, since it seems relevant here.
As far as I know, currently there is no other way to create (world)maps than taking some existing blank one, and put the color on regions of interest. Maybe it would be intersting to have such a tool online, but
more
important, to ease contributors ability to make interactive maps, which enable readers to see how a phenomenon evolved/is evolving through time.
Hi Mathieu, coincidently I worked on doing this exactly during the Amsterdam Hackathon.
What we are looking for is a platform where users can contribute to map creation online by picking the right data layers, projection and annotations. New web technologies can make this quite simple to do.
What I'm doing here is loading only the geodata for India's States as a geojson(90kb) into the browser. I then use d3js to convert and reproject the geojson as an interactive SVG along with automatic labelling.
We now have a fully functional map object in the dom to play with and with styling set via css. Type in a new language code and see what happens :)
http://4thmain.github.io/d3hacks/wiki-atlas.html
This opens a new world with d3, jquery and openstreetmap data.
I'm still traveling, and will post more details on the maps-l list in about 2 weeks. PS: I starting javascript a month back, look into the code at your own risk :)