Flight Paths in JEQL Redux

The intertubes are buzzing about a flight path visualization done by Michael Markieta.  This is based on the same OpenFlights dataset that I used a couple of years ago as a demonstration of JEQL processing and visualization capabilities.

Markieta's blog post outlines his workflow using ArcGIS.  It's a bit cumbersome - apart from having to jump through hoops to read the data from the original DAT files, apparently the dataset has to be split into six parts to be able to process it.  (For a measly 58K rows?!)

No details are provided about styling, which is the key part of the exercise.   The images apparently use alpha blending to show flight density.  Also, the coordinate system seems to be more curvaceous than the squaresville Plate Carree I used (so much more haute couture than saying Lat/Long). Both of these are easy to do in JEQL.  Here's some samples of the improved output, using the alpha channel and a Mollwiede projection.

 Europe

North America

And here's the entire image, in glorious hi-res suitable for framing:

Beautiful cartography using OpenJUMP

An OpenJUMP user just posted some really nice cartographic maps made using a combination of OpenJUMP, Inkscape, GRASS, and GIMP.

Roman Empire - Physical Map

Roman Empire - Political Map

He gives OJ the following glowing endorsement:

I find Open JUMP to be the most vector-friendly open source GIS software. The preparation of the datasets (rivers, lakes, sea, roads, borders) was really [a] piece of cake...

It's great to see the small but dedicated OpenJUMP community steadily adding new features and improving the software quality.  10 years after it was launched, OpenJUMP continues to be the "Little Open-Source GIS that Can".