Free gold maps, user interface has been updated

[Desertphile]

I have finally taken the time to update my MRDS / Google Maps web site so that it is more friendly to users, and also so that the maps can handle the 84,400+ records in the MRDS that include "gold" in their entries. I have also added a database for the absolute ages of rock samples for the USA.

The front page is here: Free Gold Maps

The user's interface is here: Free Gold Maps; New user interface

There are currently three report options for the updated user's interface: brief data grid, detailed data grid, and Google map layer. Selection is done by Country, State (or equivalent), and County (or equivalent).

The "Map by geocode location" page is here: Free Gold Maps; Gold record map via town and state.

Most people I suppose will find the address service (Map by geocode location) to meet their needs.

Note that there are web sites that charge money for this information, anywhere from $1 a day for a subscription, to $47 for "reports" with this information. That annoyed me, since the databases are in the public domain, and freely available on-line.

In a few days I am going to the desert to work one of my placer claims for around 30 days, and when I return I will be adding other databases for minerals other than gold.

 

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[TheGoldProspector]

Paranoia isnt a glorious feeling.

Be safe, keep your head on a swivel

 

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[Desertphile]

 

[Bodfish Mike]

Thank you for the hard work. Looking forward to the Quarter Quarter section township data in my area.

 

[Desertphile]

Thank you for the hard work. Looking forward to the Quarter Quarter section township data in my area.

The Quarter-Quarter data are currently being uploaded: priority goes to the states in the USA with the greatest number of known gold finds. I was astonished to see just how large the PLSS data set is: just California alone is half a billion bytes. The Quarter-Quarter Sections data will be implemented using PHP and MySQL to build the map polygons, so I will also add a feature to let people download the section data into a Google Earth KML file.

The new "Map Info" button will display the Quarter-Quarter Township data. The data cannot be shown well when the map zoom is farther out than level 11.

The amount of work was staggering; and it's barely finished. :-) Argh.

 

[Desertphile]

Common materials layer has been added today.

Township data are much larger than what Google Fusion Tables allows. Instead of adding a layer to quarter-quarter sections, I must just find an existing on-line PLSS service for that and link to it.

 

[Clay Diggins]

Here's the PLSS WMS call we use on the Land Matters site desertphile.

www.geocommunicator.gov:80/wmsconnector/com.esri.wms.Esrimap/BLM_MAP_PLSS?

You will probably need to reaspect that to get it to line up with the Google made up map projection.

You will want to pull these named layers spelled exactly this way:

Meridian Lines,Base Lines,Quarter-Quarters,Sections,Townships

We build our own PLSS grids for the claims maps and a bunch of other stuff. We host those on our own server.

As I'm sure you noticed the downloads offered by the government are incomplete and always have bad geometry that messes things up.

Hope that helps.

Heavy Pans

 

[TheGoldProspector]

Here's the PLSS WMS call we use on the Land Matters site desertphile.

http://www.geocommunicator.gov:80/wmsconnector/com.esri.wms.Esrimap/BLM_MAP_PLSS?

You will want to pull these named layers spelled exactly this way:

Meridian Lines,Base Lines,Quarter-Quarters,Sections,Townships

We build our own PLSS grids for the claims maps and a bunch of other stuff. As I'm sure you noticed the downloads offered are incomplete and always have bad geometry that messes things up.

Hope that helps.

Heavy Pans

You rock Barry

 

[nsdq]

gona have to check this out fer my neck of the woods

 

[Desertphile]

Here's the PLSS WMS call we use on the Land Matters site desertphile.

www.geocommunicator.gov:80/wmsconnector/com.esri.wms.Esrimap/BLM_MAP_PLSS?

You will probably need to reaspect that to get it to line up with the Google made up map projection.

You will want to pull these named layers spelled exactly this way:

Meridian Lines,Base Lines,Quarter-Quarters,Sections,Townships

We build our own PLSS grids for the claims maps and a bunch of other stuff. We host those on our own server.

As I'm sure you noticed the downloads offered by the government are incomplete and always have bad geometry that messes things up.

Hope that helps.

Heavy Pans

Howdy, and thank you. I have written a proxy in PHP on my server that handles calls to GeoCommunicator's TownshipGeocoder.asmx service. An example would be:

Township GeoCoder

The results return PLSS geocoding and I make a call to that server when the Google Map's center changes. First I (null) the existing PLSS lines if any, then call the service synchronously, then draw a new PLSS layer. If all goes well I will upload the page some time this week.

But I rather like your version....

 

[Clay Diggins]

Howdy, and thank you. I have written a proxy in PHP on my server that handles calls to GeoCommunicator's TownshipGeocoder.asmx service. An example would be:

Township GeoCoder

The results return PLSS geocoding and I make a call to that server when the Google Map's center changes. First I (null) the existing PLSS lines if any, then call the service synchronously, then draw a new PLSS layer. If all goes well I will upload the page some time this week.

But I rather like your version....

Wow that's a long way around the horn! I'm sure it's what Google maps requires but it sure does amount to a lot of roundtrips and assembly time.

With our own mapserver we generate an entirely new map locally with every request. No zoom levels or resolution matching problems. The slowest part is getting the data dump from the geocommunicator. Actual map creation for a 3 Mb image with 50 layers is only about .7 second. We can serve nearly 100,000 maps per minute that way and still maintain speed.

You might want to consider using mapserver on your server. It's lightweight, by far the fastest and free. Hard to beat the price!

Heavy Pans

 

[Desertphile]

Wow that's a long way around the horn! I'm sure it's what Google maps requires but it sure does amount to a lot of roundtrips and assembly time.

With our own mapserver we generate an entirely new map locally with every request. No zoom levels or resolution matching problems. The slowest part is getting the data dump from the geocommunicator. Actual map creation for a 3 Mb image with 50 layers is only about .7 second. We can serve nearly 100,000 maps per minute that way and still maintain speed.

You might want to consider using mapserver on your server. It's lightweight, by far the fastest and free. Hard to beat the price!

Heavy Pans

When I started the project my idea was to use it for my own needs. My mineral claims associates told their friends, and those friends told their friends, and "suddenly" I was getting requests for features. If I had known you and your team were going to do such a fine job on your site, I would have instead spent all of that time in bed with a good book or a friend who's read one. :-)

Google Maps with Fusion Tables was used because many millions of people are familiar with it. As long as daily server requests do not exceed 25,000 and people don't abuse the secret back-end server running on my host, it will likely meet my limited requirements.

I would indeed look at mapserver if I knew what I was doing: I do not. I am uneducated, and I shovel horse poop for a living. Looking at the web site for mapserver, it's vastly beyond my ability to understand. But i can still shovel dirt into a dry washer, so I'm still good....