Darb Dabney's 3d GIS – OpenSim

Opensim has slipped to a back burner for these past few weeks, as I button up a new edition of county terrain–this one fused topography and bathymetry.
Another focus has been to compile the map data layers necessary to publish a local edition of the large-scale topographic map, using the ESRI Community Maps Program template. This (Opensim-distracting) work forms a synergy, as the terrain drives revised hillshade and topo-bathy contour lines, as well as forming the basis for refined surface flow and stream mapping, all of which show up in the large-scale topo map. Also, I’ve compiled a great deal of web research into a single feature layer: classified building footprints, many of which have use categories [commercial, medical, educational, religious, etc.] and specific organization names included, for every structure on the associated parcel.

Why generate this large-scale topographic base map? It’s purpose is to provide local control over local detail, in a cloud-based service suitable for desktop, tablet, and mobile phone users who may consume applications that mash or overlay the base map with relatively sparse point or line features. While we’ll be able to serve up the base map through our own MarinMap servers, one of the key benefits of the conforming large-scale topographic map style (as made possible by the template) is that the caches of the four largest-scale views will be rendered and contributed for inclusion in the ArcGIS Online map services, as viewed at arcgis.com and consumable by many interactive map sites. The cached map tiles are essentially raster prints of the map template (which has styles customized at four local zoom levels) that can be served extremely fast.

Those fast maps can also be efficient, for mobile phones and tablets consuming base maps with no special rendering. Along that path, I’ve rebuilt my mobile phone this past week, taking the T-Mobile G1 and rooting it, then installing various new images until I found one that was up-to-date, stable, and attractive to use. As of this weekend, I’m now running Chromatic 4.5 with SetCPU 3.0.2 overclocking. Chromatic 4.5 is a packaging of CyanogenMod 6.0.0 with the ADW launcher and many other tunes. CyanogenMod 6.0.0 is an Android Open Source Project-based build of Android version 2.2 “Froyo”. So now, when I view maps and browser content, I can pinch to zoom out, spread to zoom in, and still push around the map to pan it on the screen. As part of sharing content with mobile phones, I’ve learned how to generate QR tags to provide access to map URL or geolocation tags.

For fun today, we visited the Silicon Valley area to show a guest some of the sights. I hadn’t visited the Googleplex in a couple of years, and many of the adjacent buildings that I recall as having different companies in them are now part of the Google campus. We found one interesting sight, too–and it appears that today may have been Google Inc.’s 12th birthday. We didn’t see any partying in the mostly-empty parking lots, which wasn’t surprising for a Sunday!