The Maps of the Week

This week I was really impressed with two maps which were inspired by BERG's Here & There horizonless maps of Manhattan. The OSM Buildings GL Inception Map and the Tangram Bendy Map both provide a horizonless perspective for any location in the world.

In both maps nearby 3d buildings are shown from a first person point of view. In the distance however rising beyond & above the foreground buildings the map of the rest of the city bends towards the heavens.


I was also impressed this week with Dropchop, a browser based GIS built with Mapbox and Turf.js. It allows you to perform quite sophisticated spatial queries on mapped data without a server and in your choice of internet browser.

Dropchop allows you to upload data from your computer, from a URL or even from OpenStreetMap, using the Overpass API. The best way to find out what is possible with Dropchop is to play with it. If you don't have any map data to hand then you can use the in-built Overpass API wizard to grab some data from OpenStreetMap.

Once you have performed the required GIS operations on your mapped data you can then download the results as a GeoJSON file or as a shapefile.