Project GIS

Project GIS is an extensive resource for hiking enthusiasts providing single source, trail relevant data in a variety of formats.

The idea behind Project GIS is to gather trail relevant information, either created locally or from existing remote sources, and make it available in various formats. Transparently, multiple data sources can be combined, as defined by the end user, in a format such as PNG, JPG, GIF, GeoTIFF, KML, etc or a tiled variant for interactive maps. For non-image data it can also be obtained as text, CSV, JSON or other desired formats. Read the Project GIS documentation.

However, Project GIS is much more than an idea. Over the last few months we have been diligently creating the foundation. It begins with powerhouse processing running Linux in the cloud. On this is a PostgreSQL database with the PostGIS extension, all served up by MapServer. We use a variety of other tools extensively such as GDAL for database pre-processing. This is a subset of the software we use to create our printed maps. All software is open source.

Become a Patron

Tell us what you want. We have many ideas. We are working hard to meet our next set of goals. You may want the same feature as us, this bumps up the priority. Patrons receive preference. Submit suggestions or feature requests in the Project GIS forum.

Mar 25, 2020 National Snow Map with major hiking trails. 6 different local/remote data sources: SNODAS, MODIS, states outline, trail alignments, resupply locations and NLCD land cover overlay. 2 different types of source data: raster and vector. Output is a single PNG image.

Project GIS Documentation/Examples

Project GIS documentation has information and examples on how to get the data you need. For instance, creating the above map is just a single, well defined link (URI is the fancy name). It can be used in the source of an html img tag, retrieved as a .png file using wget/curl or displayed right in your browser. It looks like this:

   http://gis.postholer.com/services/reflect?
      layers=nlcd,snowcover8dayLatest,sweLatest,stateLines,trace,wptByTrailType
      &ids=1,2,3,4,9,18,20,25,27,34
      &trail_id=2
      &types=1
      &startmile=0
      &endmile=5000
      &height=500
      &t_srs=EPSG:900913
      &bbox=-126,24,-66,50