Golarion GIS data downloads

[John Mechalas]

Building off of the work we've been doing in Mapping Golarion: Putting What We Know to Latitude and Longitude, I am pleased to announce that my GIS data layers are now available for download. Data layers are being distributed as ESRI shapefiles and KML.

There are still more layers coming, but what is up there now is enough for people to start building their own map and geo-related projects. The first of these is Garrett Guillotte's Interactive Golarion Map.

[John Mechalas]

I've added the Inner Sea Rivers layer, and made some minor tweaks to the Inner Sea Country and Water Body layers to keep the topology consistent between the three.

For those who like maps, here's a quick-and-dirty rendering of the Inner Sea using most of these layers so far.

[Garrett Guillotte]

Rivers and layer updates added to the interactive map.

[John Mechalas]

Garret Guillotte provided me with a forest layer for the Inner Sea, and that is now available for download. I've also made a small correction to a couple of elements on the Inner Sea river layer.

[John Mechalas]

POI layer has been updated to both correct some errors and add GNIS feature classifications.

My GNIS mappings are "best fit", and I try to apply the actual GNIS definition as closely as possible (e.g., most ruins end up as "Locale") though sometimes I make arbitrary judgement calls (e.g., is a fortress a "Building" or a "Locale" or a "Populated Place"? Depends on how it's described in the Paizo references).

[John Mechalas]

I've added three data layers for Tian Xia:

• Countries/empires/regions
  
• Country boundaries
  
• Water bodies (oceans, inland seas, large lakes)

Shapefiles are provided in both unprojected (lat/long) and projected form. Generally, you would use the unprojected data unless you are building a local or regional map of just Tian Xia.

I also made small adjustments to the continents layer so that it lines up nicely with the higher-resolution Tian Xia boundaries.

[John Mechalas]

Added data layers for the Darklands:

• Major Darkland entrances
  
• Nar-Voth POI's, settlements, tunnels, and ascents and descents
  

Also updated the global cities and POI's.

The Darklands data comes from the 3.5/OGL supplement Into the Darklands, though some of the major feature locations have shifted since that publication so a lot of adjustments had to be made to make them line up with the data from the ISWG.

[John Mechalas]

Lots of updates:

• POI data is now pretty complete, with all entries from the Inner Sea added
  
• Same for cities
  
• Inner Sea river layer updated to put names with all river segments, where known or where they could be definitively determined
  
• Inner Sea water body layer updated with more feature names, plus the Winterwall Glacier
  
• Adopted the NHD feature codes for water features
  
• Added tables of NHD feature codes in use
  
• Lots of little data quality fixes
  

[John Mechalas]

Data layers for the Crown of the World, in both unprojected (lat/long) and projected (based on Azimuthal_Equidistant) form:

• Forests
  
• Regions/land masses
  
• Rivers
  
• Water bodies

[Here4daFreeSwag]

Good to see some free GIS data stuff out there. ;)

[John Mechalas]

Added two data layers for Tian Xia, in both unprojected (lat/long) and projected (based on Azimuthal_Equidistant) form:

• Forests (thanks to Garret Guillotte for doing the work here)
  
• Rivers

[John Mechalas]

Fixed the Nar-Voth data, which I had exported as projected instead of unprojected.

[John Mechalas]

Added data layers for the two remaining levels of the Darklands:

• Sekamina
  
• Orv

[Garrett Guillotte]

I know this thread has died down a bit—work and wiki projects have taken over that chunk of my free time—but I'm hoping to roll out some neat integrations and a better, interactive 3D globe off of this data before Gen Con.

[John Mechalas]

Made updates to the following data layers:

• Golation Cities
  
• Golarion POI's
  
• Inner Sea Forests
  
• Inner Sea Rivers
  
• Inner Sea Water Bodies
  

Mostly this fixes a bunch of small naming errors (typos and the like). Thanks to everyone (and especially to Garrett) who has sent me these corrections over the past few months.

[Narolas]

Awesome job. I'm trying to use these myself with TileServerGL to render a map, but I'm not sure what format to use, I need to convert it into .mbtiles but it doesn't seem to be in the proper openmap format. I'm using tippecanoe but I think i'm missing something, the documentation doesn't really help, given how barebones it is.

I've also noticed a small mistake, in Brevoy, the "Grozni forest" should be "Gronzi forest".

[John Mechalas]

Thanks, Narolas. I'll add this to my error list.

I am not familiar with TileServerGL, but from the (rather sparse) documentation it looks like you have to create the mbtiles layers from the source data. QGIS appears to have support for exporting to mbtiles, so if you load the source data there that should get you started.

[Garrett Guillotte]

Hey Narolas, I know I'm about... checks watch... a year and two days late on this, but I:

1. Got unprojected shapefile data layers from John Mechalas's site
2. Edited them in QGIS
3. Saved them from QGIS as GeoJSON files
4. Styled the map by pointing Maputnik at the GeoJSON layers
5. Converted the GeoJSON layers to vector mbtiles with tippecanoe

It has been a while since I've gone through the steps, though.