SpatialTau - Back At It

Thank you so much for reading my newsletter. If you enjoyed reading it, please forward it to your friends and colleagues. Feedback is important and all you must do is reply to this message to let me know what you think. Remember, if you are tired of seeing my face every week, scroll to the bottom of this message and click unsubscribe. Don’t forget to follow me on Twitter, my blog or my podcast.

It’s been a couple weeks since I’ve had a newsletter and you might have seen the news I’m now at HERE. I honestly couldn’t be happier; I’ll be working with the Professional Services teams to integrate HERE into so many different solutions. I have to admit, I’ve been a user of HERE, Navteq and many of the other companies that have become part of the stack here, so it is really exciting to work with the technology on a firsthand basis. I won’t be talking too much about HERE on this newsletter as I want to keep it focused on spatial but at least you’ll know where my head is these days.

One place I’m spending my free time is on my GeoJSON Ballparks project. I won’t rehash what I’ve blogged about but it is a good lesson in always plan for a future. Or at least take the time to think about the implications of mapping every ballpark and how it might look. Something that started out so simple has really become quite complicated with teams sharing stadiums, teams moving stadium and the worst, teams changing the names of stadium. At least I can use the excuse of the MiLB realignment to fix what I should have fixed years ago.

I’m a bit at the crossroads as to how to organize this data and in what format. I’m 1000% sure I am going to have one GeoJSON file of stadiums and their locations. I’m also 1000% sure I’ll have a second file with the team names. And I’m 1000% sure I will be linking the teams to the stadiums, so I have that one-to-many relationship that I need to have. (so, I’m 3000% sure I’m doing it this way) but I guess I store the teams as JSON and then allow people to do the link. I could put the data in shapefiles or GeoPackages but then it wouldn’t be GeoJSON ballparks would it? A friend suggested that I use CSV instead of JSON for the teams and that is possible. It would be easy enough to accomplish and it would allow for easier editing of the data. But I’m not sold. What I’ll probably do is just do it once and then see what a bad mistake I made and then revisit this revisit in 5 years.

What is crazy is that this project is over 7 years old!

After that tweet, I loaded this gist up and then I lost my mind researching every professional baseball stadium in the world. All good times.