Gregor Aisch wanted a better way to make maps online that allowed something other than the Mercator projection, so he developed his own. The result is Kartograph, a lightweight framework “for building interactive map applications without Google Maps or any other mapping service. It was created with the needs of designers and data journalists in mind.” No more tiles.
The framework is still in its infancy, with not much documentation, but the map-making process seems to be straightforward. It’s basically a two-step process. First you generate an SVG map with Kartograph’s Python component, and then you load the SVG with the JavaScript component, which is built on top of Raphael.
Check out the showcase for a sense of what it can do. You’ve got your choropleth, chart symbols, and 3-dimensional projections. The star however is clearly the map of Italy, complete with a cute little ferry that follows a geo path.
Brilliant! I was thinking about making a GIS library for Raphael, and now I don’t have to!
Great to see data vis people seriously embracing and working on Raphael. D3 is great for academic experiments and proof of concept, but with over 40% of people using versions of IE (8 and below) that don’t support SVG (see the tragically depressing http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/02/2001-all-over-again-internet-explorer-6-share-grows-and-chrome-falls.ars), it’s just not suitable for something aimed at the general public.
…I spoke too soon… they really don’t work in IE8 :(
…I spoke too soon again. The plot thickens: https://github.com/kartograph/kartograph.js/commit/978a0f0f6c09bf9d397303cd8da4f6528f0f398e I’ll investigate when I have the time…
Has anyone been able to get this running from the github repo? I’ve cloned it and installed the dependencies but I’m unable to get the base python file to run. Importing via iPython returns with ‘ImportError: cannot import name errors’.
Really impressed by some of the demos and I’d love to start playing around with it.
I’ve got the same problem. The module installs but then errors immediately when I try to use it.
Then again, nothing I ever do with Python seems to work the first time.
I just can’t wait to see how it develops. Am interested to use this for an upcoming series of research notes on 18-19th century mail routes. Sans tiles is its most attractive feature.