Warsaw Transit Animation

One of my readers, a student at UNIGIS Krakow sent me this video showing the growth of rail transit in Warsaw.
If you want to open it in a separate window here is the link.
Below are a couple of still frames, they show not only the growth of the rail lines, but also the expansion of the city's boundaries.

The white lines are street trams. Green is a commuter rail line and red is subway. Much of the expansion has happened in the last 10 years with the rapid development of the SKM urban rail - the orange lines.

 Here's a map of the SKM system.

The video was created using QGIS Time Manager software. The credits listed on the video are worth repeating here.

Basemap is cartometric and was created using open source GIS software - QGIS (http://qgis.org) and Time Manager for QGIS - plugin developed by Anita Graser (http://anitagraser.com).

During work on the film, authors based on datasets created by Magdalena Trzebiatowska, OpenStreetMap project, TRASBUS and TRAMWAR websites archive and GIS data shared by Geodesy and Cadastre Office of the Capital City of Warsaw.

This film is a result of „group project” realized during the UNIGIS Krakow study program (more at: http://krakow.unigis.net), and was made by UNIGIS students: Jakub Bobrowski, Joanna Gosztowtt, Paweł Hawryło, Jacek Kuskowski and Kamil Onoszko under the supervision of a UNIGIS tutor - dr Małgorzata Luc.

If you look any of this up on Google Maps today, you might find that the Vistula, the main river in Warsaw has dried up. I hope they get their water back soon.

Dug Tries Open Source Mapping

I was asked to make some maps showing a family's escape from Nazi-occupied eastern Europe during World War II. I've gotten used to relying on ESRI's expensive mapping software but nowadays there are many good open source tools available and many of them are platform neutral, meaning I can use them at home on my MacBook, or at work on my Windows PC or laptop. I hope to use more of these tools for personal and work projects.

I looked at some good tools for creating interactive (clickable or animated) maps, but this project only required a simple printed map. After some research I settled on the MapQuest API. This creates a map by entering a line of text in a web browser. For example this URL (the full text is below) creates a map showing the two towns in Belarus (variously under Polish, Russian and Lithuanian control at the time) where the grandparents came from.

http://open.mapquestapi.com/staticmap/v4/getmap?key=Kmjtd%7Cluu7n162n1%2C22%3Do5-h61wh&size=1200,1000&zoom=7&center=53.35,26.1&pois=yellow_1,53.219784,26.68405,0,0|red_2,53.489738,26.738491,0,0

The code above includes the image size, zoom level, center (in latitude, longitude) and two points ("pois" in the code) whose coordinates can be found by entering the name of a place or address in various online mapping services - Bing Maps is particularly easy to use to get these coordinates. The map above is oddly missing country names and needs the two points labeled. This is easy to do by saving the image and bringing it into Paintbrush, a free Mac program, or Paint if you're using Windows.

The same process resulted in this map of five addresses in Warsaw.

The map looks fine but doesn't really tell a story. To illustrate the forced relocations and disappearing family members, I used Inkscape, an excellent free program but with a steep learning curve, to create arrows and some text effects. The bubble text was done using my Mac's native Preview app, though this can also be done in Powerpoint, Inkscape (with difficulty) and other software packages.

Click on the map above to see the entire picture or look at this detail to get the idea.

I look forward to making the rest of the maps showing the family's difficult journeys through France, Britain, Spain, Portugal, Mexico and finally to the United States. It's been a good learning experience both about the mapping tools and the horrible past that we're lucky to have escaped.