6 replies to this topic

[vW Maps]

A colleague has an urgent need for a map at medium-scale of central Osaka. See attached for the coverage area. Can anyone offer a solution? He's a designer so he'll be styling it himself. He really just needs the data now, preferably with Japanese labels.

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•  DIA_Osaka_RD4_A2Map_Plot.jpeg   160.08K   40 downloads

[Hans van der Maarel]

A colleague has an urgent need for a map at medium-scale of central Osaka. See attached for the coverage area. Can anyone offer a solution? He's a designer so he'll be styling it himself. He really just needs the data now, preferably with Japanese labels.

You can get it out of OpenStreetMap using one of the methods described in this thread. It looks like it has Japanese labels for most of the major roads. Smaller ones maybe not.

[vW Maps]

You can get it out of OpenStreetMap using one of the methods described in this thread. It looks like it has Japanese labels for most of the major roads. Smaller ones maybe not.

Thanks, Hans. I had shown OSM to him but he didn't take to it. And now he has an imminent deadline.

[Hans van der Maarel]

Thanks, Hans. I had shown OSM to him but he didn't take to it. And now he has an imminent deadline.

Depending on how imminent imminent is, I'm not sure whether he has any other options. Tele Atlas, Navtec or other commercial data vendors may be able to deliver in a short amount of time, but they're obviously more expensive than OSM. There's also Mapcreator but they do the styling for you and the resulting AI files are pure evil for style changes.

[kay]

A colleague has an urgent need for a map at medium-scale of central Osaka. See attached for the coverage area. Can anyone offer a solution? He's a designer so he'll be styling it himself. He really just needs the data now, preferably with Japanese labels.

Collecting Japanese GIS data with a good information is difficult. If it is really urgent, then you might want to try to talk to ESRI Japan. They sell datasets with good detail level of information including roads and buildings...

Kay

[vW Maps]

A colleague has an urgent need for a map at medium-scale of central Osaka. See attached for the coverage area. Can anyone offer a solution? He's a designer so he'll be styling it himself. He really just needs the data now, preferably with Japanese labels.

Collecting Japanese GIS data with a good information is difficult. If it is really urgent, then you might want to try to talk to ESRI Japan. They sell datasets with good detail level of information including roads and buildings...

Kay

Thanks, Kay and Hans, for your advice. My colleague ended up hiring yours truly for some fast & furious data collation and editing. I used OpenStreetMap and did only minimal fact-checking using free Internet sources. But he's a graphic designer and proudly tells me that the content doesn't matter that much--it's just a map, after all. While I gained some more experience with OSMap, the job was unsatisfying and not worth putting in my portfolio. I feel so cheap and unclean.

[Hans van der Maarel]

But he's a graphic designer and proudly tells me that the content doesn't matter that much--it's just a map, after all.

[facepalm]

I would argue that in these times of people blindly following the directions given to them by satnav's (and using cruise-control as well so they don't have to think for themselves anymore whilst driving), content matters even more.