Talk:Canada

Here's the beginnings of a Canada map.

http://harrywood.co.uk/map/canada-map.jpg

The DEMIS Map Server doesn't yield such good results for Canada, because the satellite projection distorts all the little islands in the northern latitudes (Orthographic projection works better for these).

Also DEMIS seems to miss out some big lakes all together (strangely it starts showing them if you zoom right in) A few glitches in the system it seems. So for the above, I've had to draw in the region borders and some of the little lakes by hand.

Even so, I think this is probably the best starting point, to keep the DEMIS style consistent for all the major zoomed out maps, so I'll add some labels and create a click map for this at some point -- Harry Wood 20:24, 15 August 2006 (EDT)

That's an odd looking projection. Everything looks stretched east-west. BTW, Saskatchewan is missing and the Alberta-BC border looks a tad too far to the east.

I wouldn't worry about missing lakes - they'll likely show up on provincial maps. Ditto the distortion in the Arctic Archipelago.

Michael Daly 10:21, 16 August 2006 (EDT)

Oh yeah. Got the borders a bit wrong there!

On second thoughts I found another map which maybe we could copy. Natural Resources Canada - Relief map. This even has an image map which we could also copy. Not sure if this is a Canadian government website.

There are copyright restrictions. Not completely public domain like the DEMIS images, but fairly permissive. I guess with images we can do what wikipedia does, and put detailed copyright notices on the image description pages, but do we want to use images which are not completely Free? This image has a commercial use limitation. See also KayakWiki talk:Copyrights (need to formulate a kayakwiki policy)

If the answer is no, I'm happy to fix up the above image, I was thinking we could distort it into something more like an orthographic projection, but fiddling with photoshop/gimp I've not really managed it so far -- Harry Wood 18:11, 20 August 2006 (EDT)

Anything with gc.ca is government - gc = Government of Canada. From my reading of the copyright page, it sounds like we could just copy the map image and put a "image from..." caption on it. The commercial use limit shouldn't apply to us. I'm not sure whether we should get truly "free" source material or just abide by others' copyright requirements. Obviously "free" gets us off many hooks, but finding a suitable source can be tricky. I'd say see how hard it is to warp the DEMIS image into usable form, but if it looks too frustrating, use the gc map.

I've been slow to take action on the Kayakwiki copyright. It's on the back burner - I'll get around to addressing it real soon now.--Michael Daly 23:51, 20 August 2006 (EDT)