[OSGeo Africa] Making maps pretty

[Tim Sutton]

Hi

On Sun, Oct 28, 2012 at 8:51 PM, Adi Eyal <adi at burgercom.co.za> wrote:

> Hi All
>
> I was wondering if  someone on this list would be available to
> contribute some time to an open source project looking at mapping
> census indicators. With the application - we're hoping to help
> journalists better understand census data through the use of simple
> choropleths. An early demo of what we're trying to achieve can be
> found here (http://census.hackshackers.co.za - you'll need a modern,
> non IE browser to play around with it). You'll notice that the maps
> look dog ugly and I'm looking to chat with someone who has experience
> making maps useable who can provide some pointers and possibly even
> roll-up their sleeves.
>
>
I see you are using d3. What about using a web mapping server rather. There
are a number of good options out there:

- UMN Mapserver - venerable, fast and highly configurable, though lacks any
point and click tools to do your cartography
- CartoDB  http://cartodb.com/tour web centric that supports map styling
with a CSS like syntax
- QGIS Server - backend based on Quantum GIS that allows you to directly
publish your maps (QGIS Cloud provides a dead easy way to do that, or you
can run your own backend instance).
- GeoServer - very powerful and feature rich with a nice admin interface -
runs as a java servlet

Once you are serving your data from a standards based web server, you can
start to make it look pretty - simply overlaying it with open street map or
google maps data might be a good start.

Regards

Tim


> Thanks
> Adi
>
> --
> Adi Eyal
> Data Specialist
> phone: +27 78 014 2469
> skype: adieyalcas
> linkedin: http://za.linkedin.com/pub/dir/Adi/Eyal
> _______________________________________________
> Africa mailing list
> Africa at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/africa
>



-- 
Tim Sutton - QGIS Project Steering Committee Member (Release  Manager)
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