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Does graphviz take edge lengths as input? One could let it do its magic and should, for correct data, get a map.

(I've used it with street intersection data from Wikidata and it came up with a surprisingly good map of Berlin, only mirrored.)

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In architecture school, my partner had to map a landscape using old-fashioned triangulation: using measurements between fixed points to build a map of triangles. The problem is, your measurements are usually a bit off (e.g. you measure from different points on a tree's trunk, the tape was sagging, you assume measurements are planar but there is topography, etc. If you aren't careful about the order in which you build your map, errors compound.

We developed some software to optimize for least squared error and then plot points. Not a sophisticated algorithm, but it worked well! https://github.com/cproctor/triangulation

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