Armchair explorer background mapping

aricooperdavis

aricooperdavis

Active member
Area Moderator
At the moment the armchair explorer uses the OSM WMS for background map tiles. I would love to have a dropdown box that would allow us to choose from some alternative background map tile sources.

The NLS has some good CC-BY licensed options for historic georeferenced maps (full list) such as Ordnance Survey - 1:25,000 (Outline), 1945-1965. They also have regional tilesets for much older maps such as Ordnance Survey - 25 inch, 1892-1914 (Cornwall) but you'll have to do a bit of legwork to tie all of the separate regions together under a single layer definition

Ordnance Survey's Maps API also makes some of their styles freely available up to zoom level 16, so you could use their light, outdoor, or road styles for background mapping.

Google's Map Tiles API offers a 100k free requests per month, and they also allow you to set cost/usage caps to prevent you accidentally going over the free usage and being billed.

Esri also have some nice background map tile styles, which make a good alternative to modern OS Leisure map tiles, as they show contours and hillshade. They offer 2M requests free per month, but I don't think they have a cost cap functionality.
 
Forgot to add, both the Google and Esri offerings have satellite tiles, which would be useful for identifying surface features!
 
A cost cap is the killer really - well - a service that doesn't need a credit card number ideally. We currently use MapTiler, OpenStreetview, OS and BGS - none of which require credit card. The OS one is a great deal - you get access to the premium paid service (without credit card), and get £1k free premium api usage per month.

For providers where we might baulk at signing up with a credit card - one option would be to add a custom option to the existing map layers so people can specify tiler services they have an account with together with their own app key. We could save these in local storage for user privacy purposes.

The NLS list you linked is interesting. Is this new? I thought they had delegated public api usage via MapTiler as a tile provider?

I know that Osian has some thoughts on map layers for when he gets round to looking at an Armchair refactor.

Some food for thought there.


Robin
 
You could create a KML file for users to download into their Google Earth instances and apply overlays there.
 
Yes, We want to do more with data integration - both in and out. It'll be next year we get around to doing anything with Armchair, but if people let us know what they'd like to upload to view, or download, or access via an api, then let us know.
 
Our internal development roadmap does include a major overhaul of the Armchair Explorer in the not-too-distant future. In fact, some of the ongoing refactoring work will let us do more interesting things with mapping overall.

Some of the features planned for Armchair so far are:
  • Displaying multiple layers at the same time, where you have the ability to change both the opacity and order of the displayed layers
  • A modular site marker style system, where you can choose what data a site marker represents instead of just the main products extracted there. E.g you could set that the outline of a marker indicates that it's on open access land, or whether the entry for the mine has any text content. Similar customisation would also be available for the cluster markers, which on the search page's map serve to show product distributions.
  • Various data export options, so that you can then, for example, import waypoints onto a gps device. So far I'm thinking that geojson, kml, gpx, and csv should suffice, but do let me know if any other formats would be particularly useful where these one's wouldn't work
  • Way more tile servers than the ones we currently have (while I've been slowly compiling a list of ones I want to add, feel free to share any useful ones that you think are worth including)
  • Improved in-map search functionality
  • Improved gps/compass functionality
Do feel free to suggest any other features that will be useful, and we will consider it.
 
BertyBasset said:
The NLS list you linked is interesting. Is this new? I thought they had delegated public api usage via MapTiler as a tile provider?
Click to expand...
I think they do use MapTiler to serve them, but that is a brief list of the CC-BY licensed layers they have.

Having just checked the armchair explorer again, I think you've pretty much got all of this functionality that I requested anyway and I just hadn't noticed - I don't know how I missed that obvious dropdown, but here it is for other equally foolish users!

1760978940896.jpeg

Great job, thank you!
 
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