On Oct 8, 2004, at 4:49 PM, Delirium wrote:
Stirling Newberry wrote:
Using Grass and a postgres SQL database, it would be possible to create an open mapping repository. Since a large fraction of all wiki entries are locations, this would allow maps to be made for most of them, perhaps even by a bot process eventually.
Is there any such project in process? Is there any interest if there isn't such a project?
The last time I looked at it, the maps Grass produced looked _really_ bad, along the lines of the quality of maps I could view on my Apple ][ in the mid-1980s. Simple color schemes, no shading, lots of aliasing, etc. There are a few such auto-generated maps in Wikipedia, and they generally look pretty bad too---much worse than the maps we have from other sources, including some Wikipedian-created maps.
Has this gotten any better? Ideally I'd love such a solution, but it'd have to produce results that looked reasonably good.
-Mark
The quality of inputs equals the quality of outputs - grass is perfectly capable of serving good maps from material that is good quality. It isn't the tool to produce many of those rasterizations, but there are other tools that can, which don't need to be used in wikipedia. Nor is it necessary to be committed to one GIS server.