Mapping

The IRIS client can use map tiles to display high-quality maps as a background layer. The map tiles are fetched from a web server on demand as the client map is panned and zoomed. The tiles can be generated from OpenStreetMap data. The following instructions describe one method of generating the map tiles on Fedora 29.

OSM Data

Download the latest OSM data from Geofabrik. Find the sub-region of interest — for example, data for Minnesota is here. This file is 164 MB as of December 2018.

Import OSM Data

The time required to for this process varies depending on the amount of data. For Minnesota, it takes about 5 minutes on a beefy server.

su --login postgres
time osm2pgsql -v --number-processes=8 -d osm -s --drop --multi-geometry ./minnesota-20181219.osm.pbf

Mapnik

See the mapnik installation documentation. The Springmeyer documentation is also very useful.

dnf install mapnik

See mapnik tools documentation.

sudo dnf -y install svn
cd ~/osm
svn export http://svn.openstreetmap.org/applications/rendering/mapnik
# Install prepared world boundary data
cd ~/osm/mapnik
mkdir world_boundaries
wget http://tile.openstreetmap.org/world_boundaries-spherical.tgz
tar xvzf world_boundaries-spherical.tgz
wget http://tile.openstreetmap.org/processed_p.tar.bz2
tar xvjf processed_p.tar.bz2 -C world_boundaries
wget http://tile.openstreetmap.org/shoreline_300.tar.bz2
tar xjf shoreline_300.tar.bz2 -C world_boundaries
wget http://www.naturalearthdata.com/http//www.naturalearthdata.com/download/10m/cultural/ne_10m_populated_places.zip
unzip ne_10m_populated_places.zip -d world_boundaries
wget http://www.naturalearthdata.com/http//www.naturalearthdata.com/download/110m/cultural/ne_110m_admin_0_boundary_lines_land.zip
unzip ne_110m_admin_0_boundary_lines_land.zip  -d world_boundaries

Generate tiles

Generating tiles takes about 2 hours on a 16 processor system, or about 13K tiles/minute.

su - tms
cd ~/osm/mapnik
export MAPNIK_MAP_FILE=~/osm/mapnik/iris_osm.xml
export MAPNIK_TILE_DIR=/home/tms/osm/tiles
# Customize osm.xml
./generate_xml.py  --dbname osm --accept-none
vim generate_tiles_multiprocess.py
	NUM_THREADS = number of processors in your server
	bbox = (-97.5, 43.0, -89.0, 49.5)
	minZoom = 6
	maxZoom = 16
	# comment all of the european cities listed
time ./generate_tiles_multiprocess.py
# Copy tiles to server hosting them
scp -rp ~/osm/tiles/* root@tilehost:/var/www/html/

Map Extents

Select View ➔ System ➔ Map Extents menu item

This form enables the creation of map extents, which are buttons allowing quick selection of a map location and zoom level. Each map extent will be displayed as a button on the upper right area of the map (next to the zoom in/out buttons). First, a Home extent should be created, which is selected by default when a user logs in. Other extents can also be created for commonly selected map spots.