[HN Gopher] Show HN: Serverless USGS Historical Topographic map ...
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       Show HN: Serverless USGS Historical Topographic map tiles
        
       Author : kylebarron
       Score  : 15 points
       Date   : 2021-05-06 22:12 UTC (47 minutes ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (kylebarron.dev)
 (TXT) w3m dump (kylebarron.dev)
        
       | pickelchips wrote:
       | wow
        
       | ytdytvhxgydvhh wrote:
       | Channeling Mitch Hedberg: There used to be hills here. There
       | still are, but there used to be too.
        
       | kylebarron wrote:
       | Hi all, I was invited to repost this (originally posted last
       | year) to be included in the second chance pool!
       | 
       | The USGS created topographic maps by hand from 1884 to 2006 (when
       | they started making their topographic map series digitally). I
       | stumbled upon the fact that all 183,000 of their hand-drawn maps
       | were digitized and uploaded to a public S3 bucket [0] in Cloud-
       | Optimized GeoTIFF format [1].
       | 
       | Because they're in this format, it's possible to quickly mosaic
       | images _on demand_, in a process called "dynamic tiling" [2]. The
       | dynamic nature of it gives you a lot more flexibility, because
       | you aren't creating static tiles once.
       | 
       | In contrast, the hardest part about this project is the time
       | variation. The USGS created many different scales of maps at many
       | different time periods, so figuring out how to combine them into
       | a few mosaics is quite tricky. With more time invested in this,
       | it would be ideal to have a search capability to show user-
       | specified time horizons. (Edit: I talk about this process a bit
       | more in the Github README [3]).
       | 
       | More recently I've been spending time doing similar dynamic
       | tiling projects, but focusing on satellite imagery, to enable
       | analytic processing of satellite imagery in the browser [4].
       | 
       | [0]: `aws s3 ls s3://prd-
       | tnm/StagedProducts/Maps/HistoricalTopo/GeoTIFF/`
       | 
       | [1]: https://www.cogeo.org/
       | 
       | [2]: https://kylebarron.dev/blog/cog-mosaic/overview
       | 
       | [3]: https://github.com/kylebarron/usgs-topo-tiler
       | 
       | [4]: https://www.unfolded.ai/blog/2021-04-28-raster-layer/
        
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       (page generated 2021-05-06 23:00 UTC)