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MAGIC MapIt down?

Cache! Eh?

By Cache! Eh?
in United Kingdom and Ireland

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Graculus

+Graculus

Posted
Posted

Unfortunately the MAGIC map itself is down. The MapIt! link works fine but just doesn't have a map to display. The MAGIC map goes down once a month, usually the first Tuesday at about 4pm for updates. You can view the schedule here.

 

Unfortunately it sometimes goes down at weekends. Usually not for long but today has been a bad day! In the past we'd lose it for the whole weekend. I queried this with the DEFRA team who run it and they apologised and said their IT team needed to do essential maintenance but should have checked it was back up again when they finished. Seems they didn't always do this. Now it is much better and weekend outages are not that frequent. But today is an exception!

 

Chris

Graculus

Volunteer UK Reviewer for geocaching.com

UK Geocaching Information & Resources website www.follow-the-arrow.co.uk

Geocaching.com Knowledge Books

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Deceangi

Deceangi

Posted
Posted

Doesn't seem to be working for me today :(, is anyone else having problems.

No planned outages for today listed on the website.

 

MAGIC Development Staff, must be working on the system. Hopefully it will be back up later on to day. Otherwise Graculus will once again contact them to complain*.

 

*At one point it was a regular occurrence on a Sunday, that they would not restart the system until Monday Morning. Despite supposing to insure it was back up, before leaving the building. After a number of complaints by Graculus, MAGIC Management got on top of this issue, hopefully things will not go backwards. And later on to day, it will be Displaying the Filters again.

 

Deci

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jri

jri

Posted
Posted

A question for the reviewers: which MAGIC datasets do you use when you review a new cache? I think that some of the datasets are made public by the original sources. If they were usable as overlays for the geocaching map, they might be a useful tool for planning where to hide caches, and a bit easier to use than the MAGIC site.

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Graculus

+Graculus

Posted
Posted (edited)

The full MAGIC map itself isn't that user friendly as you have to select the relevant layers yourself. Use this excellent link to enter coords as it then opens MAGIC with the layers we're interested in visible. If you want know what the layers are and how to clearly identify them then this link to my resource site explains it all.

 

Regarding the datasets. These are made available but if they are on MAGIC then it's much easier to use them. For example, Natural England make the sets for nature reserves etc available to download. It's a massive file and in ESRI shapefile format for which you need a viewer.

 

Take a look at the UK landowner wiki here for details of what MAGIC covers and doesn't.

 

Chris

Graculus

Volunteer UK Reviewer for geocaching.com

UK Geocaching Information & Resources website www.follow-the-arrow.co.uk

Geocaching.com Knowledge Books

Edited by Graculus
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jri

jri

Posted
Posted

The full MAGIC map itself isn't that user friendly as you have to select the relevant layers yourself. Use this excellent link to enter coords as it then opens MAGIC with the layers we're interested in visible. If you want know what the layers are and how to clearly identify them then this link to my resource site explains it all.

 

Regarding the datasets. These are made available but if they are on MAGIC then it's much easier to use them. For example, Natural England make the sets for nature reserves etc available to download. It's a massive file and in ESRI shapefile format for which you need a viewer.

 

Take a look at the UK landowner wiki here for details of what MAGIC covers and doesn't.

 

Thanks for the pointers. Rather than shapefile downloads, I was going to have a look to see if I could find WMS versions of any of the datasets. There are lots of things listed at places like data.gov.uk, but I wasn't sure how much was actually useful. Always assuming there are no problems with things like projections, WMS overlays have the potential to plug directly into the geocaching maps. I'll see what I can come up with...

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jri

jri

Posted
Posted

Not sure why you want to download your own datasets when MAGIC gives you the ones that are important and in an easy to view way?

I didn't want to download the datasets - just to be able to access them dynamically as overlays on the Geocaching Map, in a similar way to the way MAGIC works.

 

After a bit of research, I have now figured out how to do this using my Geocaching Map Enhancements userscript, with instructions for adding on overlays described here. I've been able to find overlays showing RSPB, local and national nature reserves and National Trust and Woodland Trust properties. These work (in various combinations) for the whole of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, while MAGIC seems to be mainly England and Wales.

 

I've not been able to overlay Forestry Commission boundaries or scheduled ancient monuments. While the data is publicly available, it's in a different map projection that can't be overlaid on the Geocaching map. To make it even easier to find this information in MAGIC, I will include a link in the next version of GME, that will let you click the Geocaching map, then go straight to MAGIC at the same location and zoom level, without having to enter any coordinates.

 

Also worth a look is the National Biodiversity Network's interactive map. It has a huge range of overlays available showing habitat and species information, as well as boundary areas that are useful for showing sensitive sites where geocaches might not be appropriate.

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Graculus

+Graculus

Posted
Posted (edited)

I'd be interested in the dataset for the National Trust for non-England (which is in MAGIC). Wasn't aware that was available. The MAGIC site has a page on the NT dataset but says due to licence restrictions it's not available to download.

 

You can download a lot from the Natural England website too.

 

Chris

Graculus

Volunteer UK Reviewer for geocaching.com

UK Geocaching Information & Resources website www.follow-the-arrow.co.uk

Geocaching.com Knowledge Books

Edited by Graculus
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jri

jri

Posted
Posted

I'd be interested in the dataset for the National Trust for non-England (which is in MAGIC). Wasn't aware that was available. The MAGIC site has a page on the NT dataset but says due to licence restrictions it's not available to download.

 

You can download a lot from the Natural England website too.

The National Trust datasets I'm using come from the National Biodiversity Network. I couldn't see any download option, but you can import theminto a GIS system from the NBN Gateway (effectively, my script turns the Geocaching Maps into a simple GIS). There are three datasets: the NT provide NI and England & Wales, and the NTS cover Scotland. Metadata for the datasets is linked from http://data.nbn.org....ype=A&grpType=2

 

I did look at Natural England, English Heritage and various others. Although many sites make data available for download (lots catalogued at data.gov.uk), not so much is available in the online form I need (WMS or TMS servers), and of what is available, not everything uses the right map projection to make it suitable to use as an overlay.

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