J.W. van Aalst, Ph.D. – November
Tell us about yourself.
I’m a cartographic designer and data analyst. I live and work in The Netherlands. My background is in computer science; I did my Ph.D. on knowledge management at Delft University. These days I mostly advise the Dutch Emergency services on (geo) information management.
Tell us the story behind your map (what inspired you to make it, what did you learn while making it, or any other aspects of the map or its creation you would like people to know).
The map is part of my Dutch OpenTopo series, which I designed to supply the Dutch emergency responders with the most up-to-date topographic maps possible. I’ve always experimented with combining the best ingredients of various map sources, including the geospatial base registries published by the Dutch government as Open data. The result is now available at www.opentopo.nl.
Tell us about the tools, data, etc., you used to make the map.
The map was made using QGIS. Some post-processing of the raster output of QGIS is done using GDAL. The map data is stored in a PostgreSQL/PostGIS database. The data itself is made “PostGIS-ready” using the Dutch NLExtract tools developed by some geo-wizards also associated to the Dutch branch of OsGeo.org. The map features data from several Dutch Base Registries (BRT, BAG, BGT, BRK) and also contains various elements extracted from OpenStreetMap.