APL and cartography

[Fiona|Dyalog]

I've received a few messages from someone who's interested in utilities workspace for making maps and computing their characteristics (geographic information, spatial diversity indexes, etc.) and with multivariate analysis (factorial analysis, etc.). Is this an area of interest for anyone else? Has anyone created any cartographic utilities that they'd be willing to share?

Thanks. Fiona

[Dick Bowman]

Don't know about making maps, but I've been hacking around with the Ordnance Survey OS OpenData files that they make freely available (although it needs a bit of hunting around their site to find them). What's there is both Raster format (basically TIF files that are readily viewable) and Vector format (which use a format called ESRI).

I asked about ESRI a while back - hoping to save myself some mental effort - but didn't get a response. It's somewhat archaic and some of my explorations have been a bit hit-and-miss, but I have a very rudimentary class which goes some way toward picking them apart.

But I'm not sure if this is the sort of thing your enquirer(s) are interested in. I'd suggest one place to start would be the OS site, where they offer various mapping tools, although they may be biased toward "other" programming languages. What they say is that they make the Vector files available for end-users to augment (with) their own maps.

My ESRI stuff is available, but in a fluid state and may be laughable.

[PhilGray]

I would have thought the best place to start looking would be Google Earth :

Google Earth API Developer's Guide
https://developers.google.com/earth/documentation/

Google Earth API Reference
https://developers.google.com/earth/documentation/reference/