I live on an island in San Francisco Bay called Alameda. Just for fun I decided to make my own map of the island using NodeBox.
I used open source data from OpenStreetMap.org. I had to crop the island tightly when exporting; Nodebox crashed when asked to import more than about 15 megs. Fortunately, the island just fit.
Cleaning up the map involved multiple passes cropping and filtering the data. All layer info was lost in the original SVG export, so I had to reverse engineer the layers by slicing and culling. One trick I used was to hook a frame node to my slice node; I could then watch an animation of all the individual bits and piece highlighted one after another at high speed to get an overview of how the paths were ordered in the original file.
I am happy with the final result. Much cleaner than the busy maps from the usual sources. Turns out there are over 20,000 buildings on the island (counting all the sheds and whatnot).
Enjoy!
John
