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Tiny World Map

github.com

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Re: Tiny World Map

#51

Post by Aachen »

rozab wrote: post #15

This is cool, but the shorelines are very low detail. A few towns in the UK are off in the sea, meanwhile Greenland and Northern Canada are hogging all the vertices. It looks as though the Mercator projection is already being accounted for in the detail level, but it would be good to deprioritize unpopulated areas.

The ratio/prioritisation of detail in cities to shorelines seems oddly skewed towards including more cities over having accurate borders or shorelines

It's showing an entire province in the Netherlands as disconnected from the rest of the country, like it's an island (it's not), but knows to name five cities inside of that province, several of which basically on top of each other. (The inclusion of the afsluitdijk, on the other hand, is unnecessary detail imo but I get that it's hard to programmatically select those tweaks about what's considered land which it needs to draw and just some sea infrastructure)

I should open a ticket on the issue tracker but am not logged in on mobile so the best I can do atm is an HN comment. If someone else has a moment and feels the same way, feel free to cite this comment towards shifting the ratio a little! Or introducing a minimum separation distance between cities, or getting a smaller overall file, whatever the ideal solution may be but the current ratio is a tad unnecessary

Re: Tiny World Map

#52

Post by jokoon »

seems a bit weird to use a service worker to do an offline version... the tutorial linked is long and worthless if you want people to quickly install and use it, you need to either make a shorter more concise tutorial.

imagine somebody loses internet access, he can't really open this thing to just access a map, I don't understand.

why not just provide a html file with the tiles encoded as base64 or something similar? just provide a zip file... I am not a web developer, this seems like a good thing, but deployment is 1/10... minimalist things are supposed to be very easy to deploy.

EDIT: just saving the page, and it works. I don't understand what the service workers are for. web dev has mysterious ways.

Re: Tiny World Map

#53

Post by Aachen »

dansky wrote: post #38
rozab wrote: post #15

This is cool, but the shorelines are very low detail. A few towns in the UK are off in the sea, meanwhile Greenland and Northern Canada are hogging all the vertices. It looks as though the Mercator projection is already being accounted for in the detail level, but it would be good to deprioritize unpopulated areas.

Nice project! It may be useful to select the included places also by QRank of Wikidata [1] so notable islands will appear, despite low populations. An SQLite DB of QRank [2] was also posted here in HN a while ago. [1] https://qrank.wmcloud.org/ [2] https://github.com/hikeratlas/qrank

(Saving people a click for link#1: qrank sorts Wikidata entries by their pageviews across Wikipedia, Wikiquotes, Wikibooks, etc.)

I'm not sure that an online popularity contest should be the input for a base map. I understand the reasoning that they're more likely to be viewed by someone, but it's also a bubble: is Wikipedia / are Wikimedia projects as popular in Asia as this base map will be? Is that used for the same purpose as this base map? Should something be shown on a map when there's a lot of drama about it rather than because a lot of people live there?

I see the advantages also, like if literally nobody lives there but it's an interesting or large landmass then there's cause for it to be included. I just don't think this is the right (objective, fairest) importance measure to use

Re: Tiny World Map

#54

Post by Aachen »

nakedrobot2 wrote: post #31

Considering the coarseness of the borders, I am very surprised this takes up as much space as it does. It seems like the total data size is well under the threshold of utility vs. filesize. If it were double the size, the borders wouldn't be so janky, for example.

The full file is some 700K without gzip compression

> all the data present in the complete version except for country borders and shorelines. This reduces [the size] by 200k

So about 29% is border/shore data, 71% is city names and locations

Imo a lot of cities could be dropped, especially when they're on top of each other (not visible until you've zoomed in so far to see a grey landmass and that city name) to make the shorelines more accurate

I'm also not sure how often a general location on a world map is needed. Wouldn't one more often want a low-KB map of the surrounding highways and transit lines one can use to reach the POI whose website you're currently looking at, for example? A version for every few km² on the planet could be built and you could have quite a lot of useful detail at a tenth of the size. Global low poly also has its purposes, like tracking the space station I guess, but it seems much rarer

Re: Tiny World Map

#56

Post by NeoTar »

I was interested to learn that the 10.000 largest settlements in the world gets you get down to 48.000 population. I’m still trying to work out if that is a surprising figure or not.

Re: Tiny World Map

#57

Post by likeclockwork »

jokoon wrote: post #52

seems a bit weird to use a service worker to do an offline version... the tutorial linked is long and worthless if you want people to quickly install and use it, you need to either make a shorter more concise tutorial. imagine somebody loses internet access, he can't really open this thing to just access a map, I don't understand. why not just provide a html file with the tiles encoded as base64 or something similar?…

That's what service workers are for.

This service worker explicitly caches all the resources the app needs to run then intercepts requests for those resources so all the JS that depends on the resources still runs while you're offline.

If you had visited the site in the past, even if you were offline you would be able to go to that URL and the service worker would serve everything needed from cache.

Re: Tiny World Map

#58

Post by keraf »

_ache_ wrote: post #18

I made the same (offline first, very small, vector based) but with a focus on i18n. So it's available in all languages of the United Nation (except Spanish because I just forgot, shame on me, could be made in a couple of hours). The name of the countries (and cities) are the official one declared at the UN. So, yeah, the official short version of UK is "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland". https://m…

Not sure if the star is supposed to indicate the biggest city or the capital, but if it's the latter, Tanzania has it wrong. The star is on Dar Es Salaam but the label over it says Dodoma, which is the name of the actual capital but it's more in the center of the country.

Re: Tiny World Map

#59

Post by lloydatkinson »

I think there's a flaw in this idea.

> By default, the map displays the 10,000 most populous cities added to OpenStreetMap. At the time of writing, this encompasses all cities and towns with a population of at least 48,000:

Statistically speaking, if you're closer to or even in those cities, you are more likely to have access to better network quality and speed. It's when you're in the more remote areas (or not near a population centre of 48,000 people...) that this project would be more useful.

If this map is only 300KB zipped and as it mentions offline-first, then surely a 1MB version would get you even better fidelity and more remote locations?

Re: Tiny World Map

#60

Post by wongarsu »

idoubtit wrote: post #26
_ache_ wrote: post #18

I made the same (offline first, very small, vector based) but with a focus on i18n. So it's available in all languages of the United Nation (except Spanish because I just forgot, shame on me, could be made in a couple of hours). The name of the countries (and cities) are the official one declared at the UN. So, yeah, the official short version of UK is "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland". https://m…

That's nice, but quite buggy. "Cape town" appears in South Sudan, though the country is not named. Erythrea is also missing its name. And there are 2 Somalia blocks, with different colors. My own experience is that it's rather easy to draw a light map and deal with i18n. There are several open data sources and libraries. The hard problem is purely administrative. If you have data tied to most countries, there's certa…

> 2 Somalia blocks, with different colors

The western one should be Somaliland, as you mention. The map seems to take the duck-typing approach to countries, rather than taking the official stance of any one country. There's Somaliland, Taiwan, Kosovo, Cyprus, Israel and Palestine, etc. No Northern Cyprus though.

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