Online map for shared-use trails and bike lanes

A new Bike Lexington map was released in June 2013. We developed a Tilemill online map version and it is online here. I have two directions we would like to go with this map. One, I’d like to establish legibility at all zoom levels so it can work on mobile devices. Two, I want to develop a version where users can submit reports on important or problematic locations with a focus on safety. It would be obvious to first map accidents and fatalities to communicate and understand how they happen.

We welcome any recommendations or contributions.

Sheltowee Trace trail with mile markers and landuse background image. First draft.

As we update the Sheltowee Trace maps, I took a diversion and looked at Tilemill from the folks at MapBox to create an interactive online map of the new alignment. Tilemill is pretty awesome app and allows you create a projects using a variety of spatial data, including Shapefiles, GeoTIFFs and GeoJSON (a new format to me, but shows some interesting possibilities).

The strength of Tilemill centers on few features; you can style layers in markup very similar to CSS, attribute data can be used for styling and interactively shown on the published map, attributes and features can be displayed differently at different zoom levels, and you publish to an MBtile file, a SQlite database. This format contains many thousands, no millions, of raster tiles that are served quite fast in your browser. In my opinion, a ton of creativity can be found in this free app.

For the Sheltowee Trace map, I pulled in a GeoTIFF of landuse with elevation hillshading, the ST trail with mile markers, and polygons of county and larger towns. After tinkering with the style sheets, I made a fairly simple map. I wanted to add so many more layers, but I had to see how it looked online. The simplest way to publish it to use MapBox’s service, but the .mbtiles file was 300 MB and I wanted to host on SheltoweeTrace.com. I needed to to use a few javascript libraries to serve this map on our server. I chose Leaflet through MapBox’s Wax library (inspired by this post) and it was fairly easy to setup. One thing I learned after a little frustration, the newest version of Leaflet.js will not work with the .js files in Wax. Use only the files included in Wax and it will work perfectly. The only other bit of code needed is something to read the data in the mbtiles file and format it properly for Wax. I used tileserver.php and it is important link if you want to display attribute data interactively.

While the map is very simple, it has some potential I think. Obviously the base map needs finishing with a good legend, but some exciting options include adding popup photos of significant trail features (with the future hope make this an interactive submission for users) and using Leaflet’s geolocation feature for mobile devices (pretty buggy now and there’s issue of offlining the data for use in the field).

Please provide contact information for your designer, if needed. We can build your ad from content you provide. We can also directly place your designed ad, if it does not exceed the ad’s dimension.

If you attach any artwork or document, please make sure it is no larger than 8mb and it is in the following format: .jpeg (JPEG photographic image), .png (graphics format), .ai (Adobe Illustrator), .pdf (Acrobat PDF), .doc (Microsoft Word) or .zip (a compressed file that could contain many files).

After you submit your artwork, we will give you a draft to edit or accept for publishing. You will also see and confirm the ad before the ad is printed.

outrageGIS mapping Ad artwork submission. Please provide contact information, in case we have a problem with your artwork.

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The University of Kentucky Native Tree Trail

The great document was made by Forestry students in UK’s College of Agriculture in 2007 and we just found it! This 2.2-mile tour locates 45 native tree species on UK’s campus and includes pictures. From the description, the document appears to be a class project for FOR 599: Geographic Information Systems in Natural Resources. Now this is a great example of using classwork & technology to keep us green and appreciate our diverse flora.

By: Lee Moser and Matt Strong
Course Instructor: Dr. Songlin Fei

This project is supported by the UK Service-Learning Grant Program, Department of Forestry, and College of Agriculture.

Download and for other local tours, visit the Department of Forestry website and click on the left-hand link, “Links and Opportunities.”

As we update the site for our 2013 hiking season, please don’t mind our fuss, too much. We’re trying organize our site better and offer more maps for spring.

We submitted the Bike Lex Map for the Kentucky Association of Mapping Professionals 2012 Kentucky GIS Conference map competition. We competed and won 2nd place! It was a great conference in Louisville and I must say that I probably gained a few pounds from all of the great food.