Perl Mapping (GIS)

[johnfl68]

Hello:

I looked around, but did not really see any posts of this nature here, so I don't know if anyone here can help. But it doesn't hurt to ask.

I'm looking for a Perl based mapping (GIS) solution. I need to merge a base map (Natural Earth), and overlay map, and some vector shape files. Nothing too difficult, but may be some different map projections in the merge.

I see Mapserver, but that doesn't look to be too Perl friendly. Same goes for TillMill. Are there any other Linux (Ubuntu 18.04 server) and Perl friendly options out there that I haven't found yet?

If anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.

Thank you as always!

[swl]

If it is non-graphical then have a look at Geo::GDAL::FFI for wrangling geospatial data. I know Ari Jolma was also developing a perl/gtk2 GIS tool a while ago, but I'm not sure if it still works under recent versions of its dependencies. Look for geoinformatica at https://github.com/ajolma?tab=repositories.

[localshop]

My quick 2 cents - A lot depends on the sort of data you have to play with and where you want to do the processing ( In memory, DB or front-end ) Here's a few spots that you should explore if you haven't already:
• The Geo::* namespace is filled with gems.
• GDAL is your friend.- CLI and process with Perl or use a Module
• OSM is excellent
• Osgeo
• OSM and OSRM
• MySQL has Spatial but PostGIS remains the winner
• Front end be sure to consider Open Layers 4 has some powerful front end capabilities
• Leaflet for a little more lightweight front-end
• The GIS Stack Exchange - bit quiet lately but worth a look
• D3.js is surprisingly capable with mapping

Don't feel like you have to go with a platform - DB+A few Tools+A front end+Some Perl Glue can be a powerful combo without getting locked into a heavy opinionated application platform.

[erix]

PostGIS remains the winner

To expand: Postgis (1) is an extension for PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL is a relational database system (2). Both are free and open source.

(1) https://www.postgresql.org/

(2) https://postgis.net/

[bliako]

As amateur and newbie to GIS: I wanted to superimpose data from OpenStreetMap (roads) onto an image made from tiles downloaded from one of the free satellite earth images sites (zoom earth).

QGIS which is free helped me to transform my image in order for it to correspond to correct lat/lon coordinates using 3 landmarks with known lat/lon coordinates. "transform" is more complex than mere scale/translate: the image needs to be warped onto a known coordinate system which allows for expressing the earth's curvature.

All that using a GUI and a plugin ... maybe another plugin could be written for automating the procedure further. But one needs to interact with the input image in order to identify visually the correspondence points. E.g. you know that a given roundabout in an avenue has so-and-so coordinates. You need to visually identify that roundabout in your image. Nobody can do that for you unless you develop image analysis software to do that for known structures... Maybe there is another way unknown to me but that looks like a challenge.

Once my satellite view of my city was mapped on coordinates, I used Geo::ShapeFile::Shape in order to read the shape of each road (downloaded from OpenStreetMap) as a sequence of lat/lon control points and draw them onto the image using Graphics::Magick. The result was accurate enough for my eyes.

That's my minimal (and amateur) experience (and I hate geodesimetry btw).

[johnfl68]

Thanks everyone for the suggestions!

Right now I am testing sort of a hybrid solution, building static layers with QGIS on PC and uploading to server (these rarely need to change). And then doing a mix of GDAL and ImageMagick for the real time merges.

This mostly works for what I need. I am going to look through some of the other suggestions as well. Trying to find a good mix to keep server loads down.

[localshop]

If you are looking to host your own tiles you might want to start with some base ones from OSM. I can confirm that the bundled script in Geo-OSM-Tiles works but there are plenty of other non-perl alternatives as described at The OSM Wiki page Category:Tile_downloading

downloadosmtiles.pl --lat=-27.919123 --lon=153.386257 --zoom=13:14

Using Openlayers you can do a lot of the transforms and adding image layer and vector rendering quite nicely in the browser directly and the downloaded tiles are neatly packaged ready to be served and consumed by OpenLayers. NB - if I remember correctly there are a few little tweaks to get the tile file format pattern correct but is not complex and works really well.

One of the things I remember surprising me when I was playing with this stuff is that it's almost trivial to transform location formats which can be a reason people jump into dependence on a backend geo application server.