Far from the pines, but very cool

Boyd

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Awhile ago I noticed that the government of Switzerland has joined the Open Geodata movement and made all their maps freely available. Finally got the chance to sift through all of this, their website is multi-lingual but all the tech stuff is in German! So it took awhile to figure out, and I have probably missed some other cool stuff. But here are 12 very cool maps of the whole country for starters - just in time to plan your annual winter vacation on the ski slopes! :D

Seriously, if you like maps then you will want to spend a little time checking this out. The servers appear to be very fast so it's a lot of fun. Here are just a few examples, choose the Switzerland mapset from the menu to see them all

menu.png


The LIDAR surface relief map is pretty amazing, one-meter resolution for the whole country. This is not the bare-earth LIDAR you're used to, this is the point cloud data rendered as a 3d model. Zoom in and you can see every tree, building, even cars.

https://boydsmaps.com/#13.00/46.378518/8.910287/swiss3d2/-91.80/60.00


3d2.png


Cool 1845 engraved topo map, they also have a nice map from 1870 and several cool modern topo's.

https://boydsmaps.com/#12.00/46.869680/8.605212/swissdufour/0.00/0.00

dufour.png


The current aerial imagery is captured at 100cm/pixel (4 inches) with a native zoom level of 21. That is 2 clicks better than our best NJ aerials. The alps are at 9" per pixel, but that is still better than our 1 foot imagery.

https://boydsmaps.com/#21.00/47.397672/8.533697/swissimage/0.00/0.00

image.png


Lots more to discover on your own. :)
 
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Boyd

Administrator
Staff member
Site Administrator
Jul 31, 2004
9,506
2,768
Ben's Branch, Stephen Creek
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