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Styling Natural Earth with GeoServer and GeoCSS

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Styling Natural Earth with GeoServer and GeoCSS
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351
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CC Attribution 3.0 Unported:
You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
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Production Year2022

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Natural Earth is a public domain map dataset available at 1:10m, 1:50m, and 1:110 million scales. Featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data, with Natural Earth one can build a variety of visually pleasing, well-crafted maps with cartography or GIS software. GeoServer GeoCSS is a CSS inspired language allowing you to build maps without consuming fingertips in the process, while providing all the same abilities as SLD. In this presentation we’ll show how we have built a world political map and a world geographic map based on Natural Earth, using CSS, and shared the results on GitHub. We’ll share with you how simple, compact styles can be used to prepare a multiscale map, including: - Leveraging CSS cascading. - Building styles that respond to scales in ways that go beyond simple scale dependencies. - Various types of labeling tricks (conflict resolution and label priority, controlling label density, label placement, typography, labels in various scripts, label shields and more). - Quickly controlling colors with LessCSS inspired functions. - Building symbology using GeoServer large set of well known marks. Join this presentation for a relaxing introduction to simple and informative maps.
Keywords
Cross-site scriptingPresentation of a groupServer (computing)GeometryXML
SoftwareSource codeComputer animation
BlogOperations support systemSource codeSoftwareRadiusComputer fontCross-site scriptingCompact spaceFormal languageVector spaceServer (computing)Public domainFormal languageFitness functionWave packetScaling (geometry)Raster graphicsComputer animationSource code
Set (mathematics)Computer animation
SoftwareSource codeProcess (computing)Boundary value problemPlane (geometry)Design by contractStictionWebsiteState of matterRankingScale (map)Multiplication signGraph coloringBitDampingHierarchyState of matterNatural numberComputer animationTable
Source codeClique-widthSample (statistics)Graph coloringFraction (mathematics)Scaling (geometry)Functional (mathematics)Source code
Computer animation
Computer fontComputer to plateSource codeSoftwareDifferent (Kate Ryan album)PhysicalismResultantCASE <Informatik>Raster graphicsComputer animation
Set (mathematics)Computer animation
Source codeSoftwareRepository (publishing)Branch (computer science)XMLUMLComputer animation
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
OK, so this presentation is about starting natural alert with GeoServer CSS. So first, a couple of introductions. Natural Alert, if you haven't stumbled into it yet, is a public domain data set available at three different low-scale variants.
It features a style-integrated vector and raster data set that you can use to make low-scale maps. GeoServer CSS is a CSS-inspired language for map styling. It's compact, powerful, human-readable, and most importantly, human-brightable. So what was the challenge here?
We wanted a significant but not too complicated base map that we could use in training, in our training package. We already had OSM styles that mimics the OpenStreetMap styling. The problem is it's nice, but it's too complicated. It wouldn't fit in four hours. The styles are too big, too long, and too
difficult to explain. So we wanted something simpler based on a small data set, and we started doing this map of Natural Alert. We started with a political map. You can see the map. It has a hierarchy of labeling, colors of the
states that do not overlap with each other. You can zoom in, get a bit more detail, and then oops, sorry, even more detail, and even more detail, leveraging the various data set at the various scales. As you can see, it ends up being made up of a bunch
of layers that are all provided by Natural Alert, and we typically are able to explain how to build this style from scratch in like four hours. I don't have time to give you all the specifics, but just one example.
Here is the style for the countries. In particular, the style for the countries at let's say 50 million. We are limiting the scale denominator between 20 and 70 million because, well, our map is not limited, just 10, 50, and 100. You can see usage of a few functions to change
the colors. I typically like to start from name the color and then make them darker, lighter, desaturated, and stuff like that. I use the color brewer to create the seven color that are powering the map, and then you can look at stuff like labeling with labeling priority
and based on the population so that we are sure to label the most populous countries first and the others after that. We are also working on a physical map. The physical map is a different challenge in that we are basically using a raster layer,
which is let's say our physical map, and everything else is just labeling on top of it. So we are taking all the physical layers from Natural Alert and basically trying to extract as many labels as possible, maintaining the map readable.
And I just started working on it. You can see a first result at two different scales. I'll have still to work on the 10 million case. Okay, so how do you get this set of styles? It's on GitHub, of course.
You can go to the GeoSolutions repository and look for any styles. The physical map is currently on a branch because it's not done. It's not complete, but it's all there. And that's it. Perfect, thank you. Thank you.