Maaamet LiDAR data and high-quality aerial imagery in iD editor

Communities Eesti (Estonia)
1

Hi all,

I’ve stumbled upon this project and really wanted to share it.
https://github.com/intgr/histonia

Maaamet provides cool aerial photos and LiDAR data, but unfortunately, this data is not available in iD editor.
https://geoportaal.maaamet.ee/index.php?lang_id=1&page_id=508
LiDAR data allows you to gain superman x-ray vision and see the ground though forests. This can help to map forest paths very accurately (but try to verify that it’s a path and not some kind of a ditch by other means)

The problem is that Maaamet either doesn’t provide map tiles in a format required by iD editor, or provides them in lower quality.
HiStonia starts a server which converts between these formats. You just use this server from iD editor and the server makes requests to Maaamet.
If you are a programmer, you’ll probably understand how to use it from the Readme, but if you are just an advanced Windows user, follow these steps:

  1. You’ll need to install docker desktop https://www.docker.com/get-started
  2. Download and extract HiStonia https://github.com/intgr/histonia/archive/refs/heads/main.zip
  3. Open PowerShell in extracted directory (shift+right-click on empty space in folder → Open PowerShell here)
  4. Execute only once or when you download a new version of HiStonia
$env:DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1; docker build -t histonia .
  1. Execute every time you want to launch HiStonia
docker run -it --rm --name=histonia -p 127.0.0.1:8080:8080 histonia

  1. Check that HiStonia works http://localhost:8080/demo/?tms_layer=xgis&format=png&srs=EPSG%3A3857

  2. Copy-paste URL (choose between aerial photos and 2 LiDAR maps) from readme into iD editor custom background configuration https://github.com/intgr/histonia/blob/main/README.md

  3. Ctrl+c in PowerShell when you’re finished with mapping.

For full clean-up you can also delete histonia image from Docker’s UI (but you’ll have to build it again in step 3 if you’d want to use it)