GeoQetriX

I've always been into geographic stuff and I'm not talking about geography back at school :) The very first version of what one day emerged as QetriX already gathered coordinates and I tried to visualize them on maps, especially custom made (calculated) from vectors. I bought an outdoor GPS device and visualized tracks from our long distance walks (sometimes more than 30 miles in a single day).

Old Q3X app with map module, utilizing Google Static Map API

One day I grabbed few ortophoto tiles from Mapy.cz, Czech competitor to Google Maps, joined them into larger area and made math function to put POI (points of interest) icons on it precisely. Then I found a function to calculate a distance between two points, because on spherical object it's not just a calculation of hypotenuse, and used points for such calculations.

Map of POIs in QetriX two years ago (2011)

Years later, after I designed the Particle, I started to think about "geographical particle". I have to admit I still didn't make any further progress, I'm stuck with three tables: point, line and area. Pavel (he's a surveyor) told me about "topology", which consists right of these three components. There are points, line is a connection of two points and has an area on each side. It's easy to convert it into 3D afterwards just by adding 3rd coordinate to the point, because no matter how hard you try, you always end up with point-line-area. And I'd like to get rid at least of one table, but I can't see how. Pavel encouraged me to do so, referring to what I did about Particle. We'll see how successful will it be this time.