Forum:Announcements/Aviation mapping - airports, airlines and routes
See also: Index:Aviation
Enhanced functionality for mapping aviation related features - specifically airports, airline and airline routes - is now live. The is part of the continued drive to populate information on the wiki directly from well-formed map-sourced data, rather than brittle manually created lists.
To use this functionality it is critical that you have well mapped airports, see Help:Tagging#Airports. Specifically the airport must have a way/relation with the expected tags, plus at least one terminal and one runway properly mapped within it too. Be careful when selecting a three character airport code: do not use an already allocated code! Check the list at Index:Aviation#Airports first. Where there are duplicates, mappers should talk with each other to sort this out. As a general rule, the mapper who first used the code (look at the way/relation history) should have priority.
Airlines should be mapped by adding tags on an HQ building for the airline, see Help:Tagging#Airlines.
Airline routes are described by adding entries into the source and destination airports. The permission values for the airport and airlines should be respected, and routes are only extracted for canon territories, "lost" territories are automatically excluded.
The ↦ measurement tool in the scale helper can be used to visualise great circle path and distance between two points. Ensure distances are realistic and avoid creating Empires in the Sky (see also the guidelines under aeroway=aerodrome in the airport tagging guide).
Index:Aviation has full lists of airport, airlines and routes, along with a map of all routes. There are already more than > 1000 reciprocal routes mapped.
There are a number of templates available to help embed maps or tables on your own wiki articles: Template:Airline route map by territory, Template:Airline route map by airport, Template:Airline route map by airline, Template:Airline route table by territory, Template:Airline route table by airport, Template:Airline route table by airline.
Technical detail: This functionality is based on extracting data from the OGF database via Overpass, transforming it using a custom Perl script into JSON files. It is then embedded into the wiki site using ExternalData and MultiMaps extensions. The process is run hourly. The JSON files are available for possible custom use from the data.opengeofiction.net site. For example it's straightforward to import airline_routes.json as a live external data source into a spreadsheet and run reports & charts, e.g. a histogram of airline route distances.