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Comment by hardwaresofton | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have a really good (maybe illustrated?) guide/short reference to the world of GIS? Every time I see GIS stuff mentioned the problem space itself, solution jargon, and various movements in the ecosystem (projects being unsupported, stewards/companies changing etc) always throws me for a loop.

It's certainly the case that I just haven't built enough mapping-related software to be comfortable but if there's a resource out there that's like "baby's first GIS application" I'd love to read through it and try to ram the concepts into my gray matter again for the day when I do work on one.

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I didn't know any GIS when I started OpenStreetMap and I think it was for the better. A fresh approach often yields a lot of progress.

> when I started OpenStreetMap

> Created by Steve Coast in the UK in 2004[0]

Thanks for starting this way back then, the amount of value created directly and indirectly is immeasurable.

That said, I'm very doubtful of the likelihood of me contributing something novel and useful to the GIS world -- I'm keep to learn from and stand on the shoulders of giants that got us here for at least the first bit of my foray into GIS before trying to contribute something fresh, RTFM and all that. To be fair it has taken 15 years to whittle down this particular wheel, starting from scratch feels almost disrespectful -- I'll leave that for younger explorers.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStreetMap

Author of the OP here. I don't have a GIS background in particular; I do have a decade of experience building web mapping applications, and here's some of the foundational software I use:

http://leafletjs.com https://shapely.readthedocs.io/ https://github.com/libgeos/geos https://rasterio.readthedocs.io/ https://gdal.org http://www.angusj.com/delphi/clipper.php

Thanks for the pointers -- Leaflet I know as the visualization layer that is basically not-mapbox-GL. The rest are new to me, and will crawl through them.

One of the nice out-of-the-box systems I've come across is Pelias[0], what are your opinions on it? It bundles and provides the API so it's one of the things I've thought to self-host if I'm going to. It looks like it doesn't do tiles so I'd need to find something for that?

From deep in my bookmarks I also have:

- https://github.com/tidwall/tile38 (in-memory search+geofencing+other)

- https://openlayers.org/ (visualization, alternative to leaflet?)

- https://download.geofabrik.de/ (where to actually download the OSM data, to hand it to something like PostGIS)

- https://github.com/maptiler/tileserver-gl (A tile server... which presumably needs OSM data & takes coordinates with bounding box parameters?)

> I do have a decade of experience building web mapping applications > I don't have a GIS background in particular;

It's only on HN that you get statements like this, haha, what do you think 10 years of experience building mapping applications is? I building mapping applications is generally what people consider "GIS background" -- if you did GIS but never produced any maps... would the trees make a sound?

[0]: https://pelias.io/

It might sound funny, but making slippy maps in Web Mercator is emphatically not what people call GIS - GIS being:

* The technical part of the academic Geography field

* Data collection and mapping work done at agencies like the USGS and municipal governments

* Work done with ESRI software (see https://joemorrison.medium.com/esri-cant-be-stopped-3b063f3d...)

Yes, Pelias is a mature project backed by a great team at https://geocode.earth - definitely one of the best options if you need an autocompleting geocoder based on OSM+other data like http://whosonfirst.org

About OSM data extracts, I also run an extracts service at http://protomaps.com/extracts that provides on-demand data updated once a minute.

Where do folks use tile38?

I don't really know what is throwing you for a loop. I have a Certificate in GIS from UC-Riverside, very respected at the time and some of my professors worked for ESRI by day and taught part-time for this certificate program.

Some basics:

Software-wise, GIS is a database hooked to mapping software so you can query the database and spit out maps as your answer. It's valuable because "A picture's worth a thousand words" and most data can be connected to a mappable bit of data (address, lat-long, etc).

A Geographic Information System has the following components:

1. Hardware

2. Software

3. People

4. Procedures

5. Data

6. Network (added more recently and not part of what I was taught, https://learn.canvas.net/courses/464/pages/unit-1-dot-2-iden...)

Data is the most expensive part of that. Good data is hard to come by.

People with the right skills and talents are the most critical part.

You can start a GIS project by surveying your in-house software, hardware, data flows, etc and putting together a use case. You probably already have some of the pieces you need to create a proper Geographic Information System where the data you already track can be hooked into a system for making it query-able and mappable so you can up your decision-making game.

ESRI is probably still the world leader in GIS software and they put out a certain amount of free info.

Check out mapschool.io

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