ExplorOz Podcast: Australian Overland Adventures and Mapping
Welcome to the ExplorOz Podcast: Australian Overland Adventures and Mapping. Michelle and David, the founders of ExplorOz and the developers of Australia's best offline mapset available in the ExplorOz Traveller app will take you on adventures and beyond. Tune in to hear how offline maps are made, and go on a virtual journey with the mapping survey team to hear how they find exciting new places and how they balance work, and holidays. You'll get expert advice, and insider tips on what's involved in long term travel including all the tech stuff, and featured locations that are being added and verified in the app content. You'll hear about the ExplorOz Team's adventures 4WDing, camping, hiking, and more across Australia, from Aussie national parks to the beaches West to East, the rainforests, gorges and islands. Fuel your passion for overlanding whether you're a camper, caravanner or motorhomer, and ignite plans for your next trip or tune in whilst you're on the road. Subscribe and never miss a new episode.
ExplorOz Podcast: Australian Overland Adventures and Mapping
Mapping the Digital Frontier: The Making of the EOTopo Map of Australia
Have you ever wondered about the magic behind creating digital maps? Cue the nostalgia as we take you back to our beginnings as a mapping publisher and the birth of our first map set, EOTopo 2013. We reveal the intricacies of our journey, from developing our digital mapping technology that allowed users to download and use our maps on various devices, to incorporating data from our research and user contributions.
In the second half of the episode, we delve into the fascinating transition from raster to vector mapping, explaining the differences and what it means for the user. Highlighting the technical challenges faced, we shed light on the incredible detail that goes into building our maps, with over 260 different data elements, each backed by its own database! You'll hear the backstory of how we have been able to produce a national product, integrating data sources to compile an outback topographic map that suits our users' needs. Listen in as we unfold the excitement and complexities of our mapmaking journey.
Hi again everyone. This episode we're going to start talking a little bit about how we came to be a mapping publisher and our first mapset, eotoppo 2013. So obviously that relates to the year 2013 and so each edition of the map that we produce is a full rewrite and it gets given the year in its name so that you know what edition you're buying and the accuracy and the currency of that app data. So we first produced our own map product, eotoppo 2013, in the year 2013, and that was three years before we even launched the Explorer Os Traveler app, which didn't come out until 2016. And so what was going on in our business in those days was really just working on that technology of digital mapping and really trying to bed down, getting a product that was easy for users to download, to purchase and use on a range of different devices.
Speaker 1:That they already had, and so the key for us is that I know there is other companies out there selling products like HN7 at the time and things like this that were standalone hand-held navigation devices. But what we really wanted to tap into was providing a digital map in a software system that would work on the existing device you had, because a lot of the feedback we were getting from customers was that they didn't want to spend $600, $700, $800, $1,000 on a piece of hardware that couldn't do anything like read their mail or make a phone call. Yet here we already had technology advanced. We had phones and iPads and things that we could carry our email and all the other everyday stuff on it. So by being able to refine our digital mapping to be in a format that those devices could utilise was where we decided to focus our energies, rather than developing a whole new bit of hardware, which is what some of the I suppose you call our competitors were doing at the time.
Speaker 2:Yes, so early on the roster products that Michelle was talking about from the 2013 release, effectively, we took the Geoscience data that we had licensed to use and, by taking that particular data and then coupling it with our own research data, we were able to. You know, with our own research data and our own styling and the way that we wanted to see the maps basically on the screen, we were able to produce those early maps. Now, those early maps, you know, in 2013 it was really a first cut version. There probably wasn't a great deal of extra content that was put in there other than what was provided from the last few releases of the Geoscience data set, and I don't make any excuses for that we didn't have. We were basically trying to get ourselves a process or a flow to be able to produce these maps, you know, to deliver to all of these devices.
Speaker 2:Obviously, over the years, you know we've had tracking systems, so we'd already been integrating with spot satellite messenger services and some other bits and pieces where people were using our services to track travels and journeys that they were doing, you know. So we were actually capturing their live tracking or people were able to upload their GPX files at the time they used to be called plot files from Aussie Explorer. It was a PLT and a WPT file. Now they've obviously all just come down to this GPX or KML, kmz or whatever other extensions they are. But we've basically been accepting that level of import into the Explorer system for a great number of years because that's basically how we're publishing our track notes and bits and pieces. So, whilst we're receiving a lot of user-generated content, user-generated plot files and track logs and tracking that was all being conducted through the systems we were able to compile road updates and road network updates by knowing where people were travelling and how you know, and what the data that we were seeing coming in. Obviously, we were also able to supplement it with other data that we could get from you know, census and the government and the native title, and we could go out and seek and source all of these additional data sets that we deemed necessary to produce, you know, a quality outback topographic map.
Speaker 2:We had plenty of complainers over the time about what is and isn't topographic. We had lots of twos and froes about what should or shouldn't be on the map. We've held fairly true to our understanding and, realistically, what we put on the map is what we think people want to see and what we know when we're travelling. We want to see. And so for years, for the first few years of our map releases, it was basically refining our developmental flows, but also then how we can accept the user generator content, the user, its contributed plot files, the tracking and also other supplementary data that we're able to download off the, you know, from service providers to compile the map products. And so over the years, you know we developed that we're still living in the raster phase. Right up until when do we change from raster to vector?
Speaker 1:2021 2021.
Speaker 2:So it's a long journey on the on the raster project and we we had a. We developed that product and kept accepting user generator content, user feedback and expanding our data sources.
Speaker 1:We need to step back a little bit here and also explain that while all this was going on. No, we can actually cut what I'm saying right now.
Speaker 2:I know what you're about to say and I don't think we want to go there, but you know we were obviously. We were obviously digital. We're obviously in the digital space. We were we're a. We're a data business. We're a data publishing business. We understand data, we understand databases, electronics and digital media. So one of the things that's easier for us would be called easier. One of the things that wasn't as complicated for us is managing databases and disparate data data sources, and mapping is all about a plethora of data and compiling it all together and formulating it into a single output entity, and that's something that, as IT people, we're good at. This is what we do.
Speaker 1:We do that with data all the time I can illustrate that for people some more, because I know when I talk to people on the phone, when they actually tell them that the way that the map is built and you've told me this is that there are 260 different data elements and each one of those on the current map and each one of those behind that sits its own database, and so one of the other things that's different with our mapping we always produce a whole of Australia map set.
Speaker 1:We don't divvy it up into a WA Victoria or even by region.
Speaker 2:We did earlier on, and that was to be able to deliver it to the devices so that people could just get a subset. Sure, but our data sets. We produce a national product.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a national product. So when we talk about EO, toppo, it is a whole of Australia. Eo, by the way, stands for Explore Oils and Toppo stands for Topographic. So EO, toppo, not Toppo, because Toppo is Topographic.
Speaker 2:Not Oils Explorer, no oh yeah, ok, we digress.
Speaker 1:But, that's actually quite funny. The number of mispronunciations is really cool, so anyway, eo.
Speaker 2:Toppo At this point you know we've gone through the production of how we you know basically the flows of how we got to producing our map. We've obviously gone through the raster production years. We then supplemented that and we wanted to move into vector-based mapping. Vector-based mapping seemed to be the product and the way that everything was moving forward your Google Maps, you know, your Apple Maps and all of those mapping products that were commonplace on your desktop, on your phone.
Speaker 1:But people don't really know the difference between raster and vector. So, you've indicated before. The raster is like a photo. If you try to enlarge that photo it gets pixelated and blurry. So that was happening with maps in that format. But that was the technology of the time.
Speaker 2:Because at every zoom level we created a picture.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right, and so you didn't have any in between zooms. And when you ran out of zoom levels because the files are going to get too big, which was around about level 13 in the old days, zoom level 13, you couldn't go beyond that because it became like a four gig file for the, for the next ones and the next ones, yeah, yeah so that's why we couldn't why we couldn't deliver a map that went to zoom level 18 in raster on years ago is because as soon as you hear about zoom level 13, we're already talking somewhere in the vicinity of 16 million tiles to produce that level, it doubles the file size
Speaker 1:for every one whole number that you increase four times. Okay, so to go from level 13 to level 14, it's four times the size.
Speaker 1:So folks listening, some of you that have spoken to us on the phone over the years and going why can't I get more detail? It was because of that. We knew that you won your. You didn't have in begin at the time and you just couldn't download that amount of data for a whole of Australia map file, and so until we had the technical capability of being able to deliver that more high resolution detail, we couldn't do it. And so that's what the transition from raster that word raster is the image gets pixelated when you zoom it to vector. Vector is fantastic. Vector is a format that our modern devices use all the time you're used to using. You just don't know the term, but everything is 100% clear, high resolution and high zoom.
Speaker 2:I'll try and simplify what vector is. Vector is basically so if you took a drawing frame and you drew a circle and a square and a line and a dot, those particular elements are vectors. So when the map is, when we deliver vector data, basically we're delivering the coordinates of a square or the coordinates of a dot, or the position on this image that we're going to place each of these elements. So they're actually the data is actually compiled on the device. It's built at the time. So all we do is we say put a square there. It doesn't matter how big the square is and which part of the square is. It's going to produce a square. So the square will just get bigger at different zoom levels and smaller at other zoom levels, based on the size of the actual square.
Speaker 1:So now you see the difference between the two of us. He's the technical one and I will just dump it down for you, because I don't understand everything he's saying anyway, basically with vector.
Speaker 2:We can. We can produce data to a certain zoom level and that data will carry through on further zoom levels because it is being drawn at each of those levels. It's not a picture, it's not a static image at zoom level 13. So we can go up to zoom level 18. In fact, we could actually go to 21, but we've limited at 18.
Speaker 1:You know, people like to know. What does this zoom level number mean? What does it equate to it's?
Speaker 2:historical and it goes back to Google zoom levels. Google started the zoom level. The Google started with the zoom levels way back early on in the days when they created their maps, and there is a whole technical documentation about what the zoom levels. It is a. It is a geo. It is a geo mathematical reason.
Speaker 1:But the max scale right, yeah, but it's to do with the whole surface of the earth on zoom level zero.
Speaker 2:And then each of the. The numbers are subjective. The numbers are one, to whatever exact scale, it's not an exact scale.
Speaker 1:We do show a little scale bar in the bottom right hand side and, like I know, at max zoom, which is level 18, that number says 20 meters.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And that's a pretty detailed, isn't it?
Speaker 2:So there's a bit of history on the EO Topo product and you know, make sure you subscribe and catch up with us on the next blog in the series. Speak to you later. Bye.
