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Tiny World Map

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Re: Tiny World Map

#71
post #64

I'm not sure the 10,000 most populated cities is the best filter. This will prioritise cities in large countries with smaller countries likely to have most if not all cities unavailable. Should be a secondary filter that has the top X cities in each individual country, this should capture all major cities in smaller countries.

There are other measures of urban significance.

Capitals (national, regional), global cities, cities by local prominence, etc., might all be useful modifications to the basic criterion.

I suspect geographers and cartographers might be able to inform this discussion more usefully.

Re: Tiny World Map

#72
post #56

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.

I'd long known that the largest 100 or so US cities by population gets down to the roughly 200k population level. Extending that to 200 cities is still above 100k (per Wikipedia, #333, Daly City, CA, is pop. 100,007: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...>). The relationship, as with so much else in scaling circumstances, tends to be linear on a log-log scale.

In China, you'd reach position 106 before finding a city of less than one million in population (the US has only nine such cities).

India, checking just now, has 46 cities with > 1 million population, the 100th ranked (Malegaon) is 471k, and at #300 population remains > 100k (Aurangabad).

Keep in mind that "city" is a highly arbitrary definition, and some of the world's largest cities would be the equivalent of metropolitan areas or even states or provinces elsewhere.

The largest city by area actually has a remarkably small population: Sermersooq, Greenland, with a population of 24,148 and land area of 575,300 km^2 (220,000 mi^2), which is not only larger than the US state of Rhode Island (by a factor of nearly 144 times), but all but two US states: only Texas and Alaska are larger, and the latter only modestly so (by 12%).

Urban geography is a complicated topic, and typically you'll find that comparisons are made on the basis of multiple scales and definitions such as metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) and built-up land area, as well as population, which tend to smooth out arbitrary distinctions of political boundaries and give stronger weight to total demographic or economic influence.

Re: Tiny World Map

#73
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…

Well done. I'd need it to be vector based too.

Re: Tiny World Map

#74
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…

Couldn't find any description on how you made that, it is a beautiful map. There are things about Tiny World Maps as well, but they do not have a good description on how it's made either. From my own experience on a country scale it was a manual process with dirty hacks then getting the testing to get it right was the worst (mainly the right generalization, and what people expect on their local map).

Do you think it is worht the effort for you to significantly improve this map?

Re: Tiny World Map

#75
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.

> A few towns in the UK are off in the sea And some, notably Manchester, are entirely absent.

This has been fixed.

Re: Tiny World Map

#76
Love it! Wonder what is the logic behind having some lines ending with ";" in some cases and not having them in others. Is it just editor artefacts? i.e. the author had no intentions to put them, but the editor in some cases inserted them automatically.

Re: Tiny World Map

#77
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.

I've published a nightly version [1] that removes fjords and adds more detail elsewhere. It also generally has a higher resolution. The reason I originally didn't do the latter is because old phones, especially those running Firefox for Android, can crash while drawing large amounts of polygons. I have since optimized the drawing procedure, but beware!

[1] https://tinyworldmap.com/beta.html

Re: Tiny World Map

#79
I see this and the first thing I want to know is creating a Voronoi partition in order to see which city with >48k habitants is closest to any point in the map.

What is wrong with me.

Re: Tiny World Map

#80
Thanks for the feedback, everyone. To give some context for our choices: until recently, country shapes were not the main focus of this project. For a long time, the version in the README without country borders was the only version, because we didn't think adding the entire world was feasible. Turns out, it was.

I've published a nightly version [1] that removes fjords and adds more detail elsewhere, including the much-requested islands. It also generally has a higher resolution. The reason we originally didn't do the latter is because old phones, especially those running Firefox for Android, can crash while drawing large amounts of polygons. I have since optimized the drawing procedure, but beware!

[1] https://tinyworldmap.com/beta.html

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