Our Netherlands biking and sailing trip was such an enjoyable and memorable vacation, I wanted to have an appropriately remarkable souvenir, so I set out to create one! My idea was to create a unique map that highlighted some of the notable facts and figures. I had recorded all of our bike rides on a GPS, so that was one of the primary data sources I wanted to visualize on the map. If I had thought of this idea ahead of time, I would have bought a low power GPS tracker to leave on the boat to record our sailing track as well, but it didn’t occur to me until later. One other exceptionally interesting aspect of the sailing was the Waddenzee itself — it is such a shallow body of water that not many (larger) boats are appropriate for it. Our boat’s draft was just 1.6 meters, but we still had to be very careful about the path we sailed on, and had to time certain legs of the trip to coincide with high tide, to avoid grounding the boat.
I was subsequently able to solve the lack of boat tracks by purchasing the data from a company called VesselFinder, which monitors position reports that are broadcast by all commercial vessels, and records them. I had tried contacting the tour operator, but never got a helpful response on that query. So that cost me some money, but it was worth it to be able to see how carefully we followed the channels, and also to see our tacking on the sailing legs.
So I had found a mapping program, QGIS, for creating a map from scratch, but like all new programs, especially complex ones, there was a lot to learn. And it was then that I turned to AI (ChatGPT specifically) for help. I was able to have conversations with ChatGPT about how to find relevant data sources, how to incorporate that data, how to layer the data, how to color it, and all kinds of other things.
Creating the map took many hours, spread over many weeknights and weekends, but it’s honestly hard to imagine doing it without the assistance of AI. It can consume published documentation and digest it, and answer questions. I was very pleased with the assistance, and with the results. In the end, we had it printed at a fancy photo printing shop at 24″ x 36″, and framed it in an inexpensive poster frame.
Leave a Reply