worldize: drawing of geographical data

[zverok]

Project

worldize is an early prototype of geographical drawing library, but when it was published, it received some good amount of attention.

There is a clear plan of development, but unfortunately, I never had enough time to continue.

Plan

1. Make generic "map drawing" API (line from this geo point to that geo point, rectangle, polygon, write text near those coordinates, and so on): most of the work is already prototyped in the map branch of repo, yet never finished.
2. Different slices of the map, not always entire world;
3. Different globe projections and other map transformations;
4. Map frame: title, legend and so on.
5. Map tiles from open servers

Ideally, the (1) should be released as a new useful gem, with docs and some specs, and then small releases should be made every now and then, following what (possible) library users could want and what use cases would emerge.

Importance

While most of the today's visualizations are indeed done in a browser with D3.js or something like it, server-side generation still can be useful (for PDF reports, including in emails, visualizing simple scripting experiments, this kind of things).

Skills and domains

Ruby's graphical libraries, geographical calculations (they are HARD), external APIs (for tiles).