Edwins wiki

Over the years i have recorded my location during travels and holidays using satellite navigation receivers. It is nice to be able to see where you've been once your back home. Like photo's maps make you recall memories, especially when you can see on a map exactly where you've walked. My personal map is based on some ten years of data, all collected using a series of satellite navigation receivers. The first one, a Garmin GPS-12 had limited memory and while on holiday i had no means of downloading the files to a computer. So the first years it was mostly waypoint collection. These days i store every trackpoint, up to one per second.

The data from the satellite navigation receivers is stored as GPX files containing waypoints and trackpoints. OVer the years that results into a lot of files. Plotting all files on a map becomes impractical. So i started feeding all data into a (Postgis) database. A database gives you the possibility to recompute tracks from the separate trackpoints and to compute statistics. The whole database can easily be visualised using a GIS application like Qgis. With a mapserver the map can be made available as a webmap.

The webmap shows more than just the waypoints and trackpoints. Using a script i have computed new tracks from the data and statistics over areas. Because everybody is drawing hexagons now i have computed the statistics per hexagon. Hexagons also make sense. They are the best way to pack areas on a map.