A basemap for Austria
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Gartner, G.
1TU VIENNA Email: georg.gartner@tuwien.ac.at
Abstract
basemap.at is a new basemap for Austria, based on Geo Data from the regional administrations of Austrian States. It is freely available and implemented in a way, that a high performance can be guaranteed and sustained. It is meant as an alternative to commercial and volunteered base maps, allowing everybody to refer to current, up-to-date and modern base map data. One of the main characteristics of basemap.at is, that it is available through the Creative Commons Licence, thus it is a project of Open Government Data. With this free of charge usage of the data is allowed, even commercial use. According to the Open Data Index of the Open Knowledge Foundation basemap.at is the only national map, which fulfills all respective criterias of openness. basemap.at is implemented as cooperative project. While federal ministries and agencies in Austria are not following the model of Open Government Data (yet), the regional administrations, private companies and the Vienna University of Technology are working together in providing seamlessly geodata from their region which are integrated in a tile-based web service. The integration includes a number of harmonization steps, which reflects also the need within the data providers to modernize their data structures. The hill shading was derived from current ALS data, allowing for more details in mountain areas. An important role plays the austrian-wide multimodal traffic graph (called "GIP"), which includes a sustained, detailed, topological correct graph of all traffic infrastructure of Austria. An important element of basemap.at is cartographic design, thus the visualisation variables have been chosen carefully to allow for a pleasing use. The tile cache is due to WebMercator Auxiliary Sphere, thus OGC conform. It is calculated every second month and a 24/7 availability is guaranteed. Interfaces to basemap.at are provided via WMTS and GetCapabilities, and a full compatibility to ArcGIS, QGIS, OpenLayer, Leaflet, GoogleMaps, BingMaps, Open Street Map is given.
Keywords
basemap; open government data; web mapping