Blog posts tagged maps

Presenting the SkyTerrace Interactive Map at NACIS 2022

The good news is that, when the airport and the museum began to resume on-site operations in earnest, the application I’d developed had been running unattended and attached to a big honking monitor for 18 months and everything still worked. The bad news was that no one wanted to touch any kind of public surface anymore.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on October 28, 2022 and tagged skyterrace, nacis, maps and ios.

Map updates, August 2022

On a personal note I am especially excited about the 2022 aerial imagery because it appears to have captured the aircraft I call “Cake Plane” visiting SFO.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on August 08, 2022 and tagged maps.

Serving map tiles to yourself using Protomaps and iOS

Aside from solving an immediate technical problem we are excited about how this approach might be applied to future projects and we hope you will be too.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on March 30, 2022 and tagged swift, ios, maps, protomaps, openstreemaps and skyterrace.

Interactive maps of SFO from 1930 to 2021 (and beyond) at the T2 SkyTerrace

The recently opened Mills Field and the San Francisco Airport exhibition in the SkyTerrace observation deck in Terminal 2 includes an interactive map installation that allows visitors to view the history of SFO by browsing over three dozen aerial maps from 1930 to 2021. Orginally designed as a touch-based interactive application, designed to work entirely offline, it was updated earlier this year to allow visitors to control the map using their personal mobile devices.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on November 19, 2021 and tagged maps and skyterrace.

Geotagging at SFO Museum: Client-side EXIF, Web Components, Tilepacks, AppRunner and Live Demos

While this particular instantiation of the geotagging application is scoped to the physical boundaries of SFO the code itself is not specific to SFO Museum. It can be used, in combination with custom databases of map tiles and geographic data, with any image on your computer. This code will continue to be the common infrastructure that we build a SFO Museum application, specific to our needs, on top of.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on June 16, 2021 and tagged golang, geotagging, aws, reverse-geocoding, tilezen, maps and aws.

Geotagging at SFO Museum: Protomaps, search and reverse-geocoding

The bad news is that, when you look closely, there really are that many moving pieces when it comes to something like geotagging photos. The good news is that nearly all of those moving pieces, from the underlying data to the tools to operate on those data, are within the reach of cultural heritage as low-cost and open-source alternatives to the commercial offerings. We may still need to stitch those pieces together to meet the needs of a specific institution but at least they are within reach now.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on May 03, 2021 and tagged golang, geotagging, whosonfirst, geocoding, reverse-geocoding, placeholder and maps.

Geotagging at SFO Museum, Part 8 – Old maps

What’s become clear as we work through geotagging photos in the SFO Museum collection is that it’s very useful to be able to geotag things using a map from, or near to, the same year that a photo was taken. The facts on the ground change often and fast enough at SFO that it can be hard to make sense of an old photo using a contemporary map.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on May 04, 2020 and tagged sfo, collection, history, geotagging and maps.

Geotagging at SFO Museum, part 2 – First Steps

In the end we may deploy this application for staff as a hosted website on the internet but we would like to have the ability and the flexibility for staff to also run the application locally, from their desktop. The majority of museum staff are not developers and won’t know how or be able, or want, to install the external dependencies that might be necessary for an application written in another programming language to run.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on April 24, 2020 and tagged geotagging, sfo, collection, golang and maps.

Map updates, 2019 - 2020

We’ve updated the historical aerial maps section of the Mills Field website to include imagery from 2019. We’ve also made some user interface and user experience changes to the map to improve its use on small and mobile sized devices.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on January 10, 2020 and tagged maps and history.

More recent old maps (and the shapes in the details)

Wandering around the airport at high zoom levels, seeing the “shape” of airport in its details, is so much fun we’ve added a handy 📷 button to the map that will allow you to create an image of whatever you happen to be looking at.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on November 06, 2019 and tagged history, maps, rasterzen, sfo and whosonfirst.

Sweet spots between the extremes

This is a technical blog post about map tiles, caching, third-party services, so-called “serverless” computing and sustainability. It’s also about improvements to open-source software for managing all of that stuff.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on November 07, 2018 and tagged aws, golang, whosonfirst, maps, nextzen and rasterzen.

More old maps and more-better architectures

All of these many SFOs are important because they help to contextualize things (like the photo of Rotunda A) in the moment but also to demonstrate how that context has changed over the years.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on October 04, 2018 and tagged architecture, maps, opendata, whosonfirst, sfo and history.

Who’s On First at SFO Museum

Today, we are happy to announce the first release of historical building footprints and interior spaces, including galleries and public art, at the San Francisco International Airport (SFO) as an openly licensed dataset. The data spans the years 1954 through 2018 and is published under the Linux Foundation’s Community Data License Agreement - Permissive 1.0 (CDLA).

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on August 28, 2018 and tagged architecture, opendata, whosonfirst, sfo and maps.

Old maps (and old map tiles) at SFO Museum

Did you notice the aerial overlay of the airport in final image in our last blog post about maps? That’s what this blog post is about.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on August 07, 2018 and tagged maps and sfo.

Maps (and map tiles) at SFO Museum

Maybe these maps are simply a fail-safe and only used when nothing else works. Their value then comes from giving us the confidence to try a more sophisticated approach while still having a way to get home safely, so to speak.

This is a blog post by aaron cope. It was published on July 31, 2018 and tagged maps, nextzen, sfo, aws, golang and rasterzen.