When my daughters were younger, we discovered cube craft paper models as a fun way to create paper toys. I then discovered that you can do the same thing with maps. The cubed Gnomonic projection is perfect for creating simple map cubes that kids can easily print, cut out, and assemble with a glue stick. Let’s use GeoScript Groovy to create a custom map cube.

Natural Earth has vector and raster data. In this post, I will download a Natural Earth Raster and create MBTiles file with prerendered tiles. I wanted to use GeoScript Groovy here to show how easy it is to automate this process. Finally, we will use MBTilesServer to serve our MBTiles file on the web.

Natural Earth data is a great dataset. You can easily download it as shapefiles but I like to bundle these multiple files into a single GeoPackage dataset. I wanted to use GeoScript Groovy here to show how easy it is to automate this process.

I recently finished reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Triology. There are a lot of great maps in those three books and it inspired me to look around and see if I could find GIS data for Mars. I found the https://astrogeology.usgs.gov web site which has awesome surficial geology maps and data of the red planet.

GeoScript Groovy inherits a powerful projection system from the GeoTools project.
After reading a recent article in the Economist about how they choose the right map project, I wanted to see how many of these various projection GeoTools and GeoScript supported.

In my last post, I calculated centroids from one shapefile and saved them to another using a GeoScript Groovy script. This time I buffer these centroids and save them to a polygon shapefile. Since GeoScript is based on the Java Topology Suite library you can take advantage of any of its geometry operations - intersection, union and difference.

GeoScript uses the GeoTools and Java Topology Suite libraries to provide easy-to-use scripting APIs with implementations in Python, JavaScript, Scala and Groovy. The GeoScript web site provides simple code snippets in all four languages to help you get started. In this post, I address a real world example: calculating centroids from one GIS layer and saving them to another layer using Groovy. This example highlights the GeoScript Layer, Feature, and Geometry modules.

The Java Topology Suite, which Groovy GeoScript wraps, contains spatial operators that act on a group of Features or Geometries. In this post, I collect all geometries from a shapefile to calculate the convex hull and minimum bounding circle. This post builds on previous blog entries where I use GeoScript to extract centroids and buffer Features.