GSAK - custom map for France

[+Astartus]

Bonjour et salut,

 

excuse me when I continue writing in english, but my french is pretty bad and rusted.

 

On the GSAK boards, the need for a custom map of France has appeared, and as I already made several custom maps for Switzerland or Finland, I decided to also put my hands on a map of the departements in France.

 

All users of GSAK are welcom to try out the first version of the map definition file for France which you can get HERE

 

As Groundspeak currently does not support the informations for the regions, users would have to manually add these informations into the "State" field. To prevent these informations from being overriden with the next import of a GPX file, either lock the listing or use the States Backup and Restore Makro to save the informations.

 

The map definition files includes all continental regions and the island of Corse. It does NOT include the oversea regions of Martinique, French Guinea, Reunion and Guadaloupe

 

If you find bugs or have questions or requests, feel free to post these here (but please write in english, if possible).

 

With friendly greetings to all french cachers

Astartus

Edited August 6, 2008 by Astartus

[+sTeamTraen]

Sounds impressive - I'll try it out at home tonight - thanks!

 

As Groundspeak currently does not support the informations for the departements, users would have to manually add these informations into the "State" field. To prevent these informations from being overriden with the next import of a GPXX file, either lock the listing or use the States Backup and Restore Makro to save the informations.

 

So far there has not been much demand in France for subdivisions. If it did happen, I think it's much more likely that it would be by région rather than département. There's around 100 départements and the dropdown list would look silly. However, since a région boundary is always a département boundary, it wouldn't require much extra work for your map.

[+Astartus]

Butter my butt and call me a biscuit.

 

Of course the map is for regions. No idea what made me say it was for the 100+ departements. It's only for the 23 regions.

 

Changed my previous post

 

Also, here is the uncolored map: http://gsak.net/stats/newmaps/custommap.php?map=France

Edited August 6, 2008 by Astartus

[kikinoot]

Hi,

 

In order to use this map (France), I've developed a macro to set automatically the "State" field.

You can see the result on my profil page (scroll down).

 

The macro embeds (base64) a zip file that is extracted on startup. There are 22 files (regions) in

the zip and each file provides a low-resolution (speed VS precision) polygon of a given region.

The polygons are extracted from a kml file (expat, bash, sed & awk are used).

 

The macro loops on regions (AL, AU, ..., RA). On each loop, a filter is set to select only

found caches in France where "State" is "Nil" and then, the ArcFilter is applied. If there are

results, the "State" field is updated accordingly.

 

Even if I've tested this macro, please backup your database before giving it a try !

You can find the macro in this post.

 

Nicolas

[+Astartus]

Thanks for trying out the map. Looks pretty good so far. Might post a small update to the definition file next week. Only some minor corrections to the coordinates for the found numbers.

 

Your macro sounds promising. Could this be adapted for outher countries as well? Was just about to send you over to the GSAK boadrs wehn I noticed your post there

[kikinoot]

Thanks !

 

I've updated the macro this morning to use the GetPolygon() routine (as suggested by Clyde): It's now VERY FAST !

 

To answer your question, I think it can be adapted to other countries.

For France, I've found a kmz file (link) with regions & departments. In GoogleEarth, what I've done is to save as individual kml file each regions (AL.kml, AU.kml, ...). Then, I've some executable/scripts (expat, sed, awk, bash) that extract the polygon (AL.txt, AU.txt, ...) from the kml files (for some regions, there are many polygons in the kml (lakes, islands, etc) so I decided to select the first one in the file).

 

Do you know if there is a map for the UK ? Recently, I've found there some caches and the "state" field is also "Nil". Maybe we can try with it !

 

Nicolas

[+Astartus]

As far as I know there is currently no map for the UK. Creating one wouldn't be a problem, but the big part is to agree on the level of administration.

 

Endgland is devided into 9 regions, these regions are then devided into counties etc. Some cachers might say, the 9 regions are enough while others want a higher level of granularity.

 

Maybe we would have to start a poll on the "english speaking" sub-forum

[+sTeamTraen]

Maybe we would have to start a poll on the "english speaking" sub-forum

 

I think you mean "UK" but anyway, I see that you did.

 

The introduction of regions/states was a big issue there, partly because nobody in the UK knows which administrative region they live in, or even which county in some cases (it's a very long and boring story). In the end they came up with some fairly neutral names like "South-West England", but even that has been giving problems because some counties which most people would say are "in the South-West" (for example) aren't. So a GSAK overlay could be helpful for people to get used to the "regions".

[+Marpaut]

Thanks guys for this work!