On the New York Times’s Gadgetwise blog, Rik Fairlie asks why more digital cameras don’t come with GPS. “[C]amera makers say they haven’t adopted widespread use of GPS radios in cameras because it’s expensive — it can add almost $100 to the cost of a camera — and because users haven’t really demanded the feature. Camera manufacturers see GPS as a niche market.” Via Richard.

Why More Cameras Don’t Come with GPS first appeared on The Map Room: A Weblog About Maps on July 29, 2010. Copyright © 2010 Jonathan Crowe. Distributed under a Creative Commons licence.

If you haven’t seen the demo of Microsoft Research’s Street Slide, it’s a pretty cool addition to Bing Streetside that is not available yet, but will be presented at SIGGRAPH 2010. While Google Streetview and Bing Streetside allow you to see photo representations of an area as you navigate through it, you’re basically limited to the perspective from your position on the centerline of the roadway as you look left or right. What Street Silde allows you to do is zoom out and take a side scrolling type of look at the whole side of the street moving side to side and panning over the streetscape. It looks like you can also get a panoramic view as well. If you want to see Street Slide in action, check out this video:

Via Engadget and MIT Technology Review

What kind of questions should I not ask here?

Be nice.

Be honest.

Mapperz Mapping News Blog

At the Google I/O developer conference earlier this year we previewed the Places API, a new service that will allow applications to search for Places, and obtain detailed information about individual places selected by users. At that time we posted documentation and provided an Application Form that developers can use to indicate their interest in using the API.

We have been delighted with the enthusiasm we have seen for the Places API, and the innovative ways in which developers would like to use it. We have seen applications that offer check-in to places and need to identify an individual place at which a user is currently located, applications looking to show a user Places around them, and applications looking to offer a search and browse experience for Places similar to that offered on Google Maps.

We are going to focus initially on check-in applications. These are the applications that we feel the API currently caters to well, and we are excited to work with developers building these applications to understand their requirements, and ensure that we are offering them the best possible experience.

When we previewed the Places API back in May we indicated that we planned to begin processing applications in July. I’m happy to say that we have now begun reaching out to developers who have expressed an interest in building check-in applications using the API, including those working on client applications for the Buzz API.

If you have already applied to use the Places API and you feel that your use case fits this initial focus, please log back in to the Application Form and ensure that your description makes this clear. To manage usage we will be issuing credentials to developers in stages, so please do not worry if you do not hear from us immediately.

If your requirements extend beyond the check-in use case, please bear with us and we will be in touch once we are confident that the API can effectively meet your needs.

Posted by Thor Mitchell, Maps API Product Manager

It appears that another Google Earth imagery update is underway -- thanks to GEB readers 'Eero' and 'cristi' for being the first to let us know about it.

As is often the case, you can use Google Maps to determine for sure whether or not a specific area is fresh. This new imagery isn't in Google Maps yet, so you can compare Earth vs. Maps to see what's new; the fresh imagery is already in Google Earth, but the old imagery is still in Google Maps. If you compare the two side-by-side and they're not identical, that means that you've found a freshly updated area in Google Earth!

[UPDATED -- 29-July, 9:41pm EST]

• Finland: Southern areas -- thanks 'Eero' and 'cristi'
• Nepal: -- thanks 'Steven'
• Netherlands: Various areas -- thanks 'Maarten'
• United States: San Jose and Sacramento, CA (thanks 'Steven'), Des Moines, IA (thanks 'cristi), Boston, MA (thanks 'Kevin') and Las Vegas, NV (thanks 'cristi')

If you find any other updated areas, please leave a comment and let us know!

Enjoy this video demo of Street Slide imagery as presented at this year’s SIGGRAPH 2010 event. Systems such as Google Street View and Bing Maps Streetside enable users to virtually visit cities by navigating between immersive 360panoramas, or bubbles. The discrete moves from bubble to bubble enabled in these systems do not provide a good [...]

GEB reader 'fjk' has recently completed a bicycle trip across much of northern Poland, and he did a great job of tracking the journey and augmenting it with photos and other information.

A group of four of them completed to the trek to Swinoujscie, and they used a Garmin 60CSx to track their route.

To view the trip in Google Earth (as seen above), you can simply load this KMZ file. To see more of his adventures, check out his website.

It's great to see people sharing their journeys using Google Earth. If you missed it last month, a few GEB readers used the new "track" feature in 5.2 to show the progress of a 23km race that one of them participated in.

If you've created an interesting track in Google Earth recently, let us know about it and we may feature it in a future post.

We’ve only ever written one other post about Venezuela, so it’s about time we took another trip. We’d like to have crafted a post about the Orinoco River, but sadly there isn’t enough of it in high resolution to write about… until you get to the Casiquiare canal.

The Casiquiare canal is the largest river on the planet that links two major river systems, and is possibly the best example of river bifurcation to be seen anywhere.

The Orinoco river splits into two rivers at this point. In the picture above the river flow is from the right to left, with the Casiquiare canal in the middle taking approximately ⅓ of the water from the Orinoco and diverting it in a southerly and south easterly direction, until it reaches the Rio Negro near the town of San Carlos.

What’s so amazing about this? Well, the Rio Negro is a tributary of the Amazon river, so the Casiquiare canal in fact forms a totally unique natural link between two largest river systems in South America.

Locations: Venezuela / Categories: Natural Landmarks

View in Google Earth

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

Enjoy this video presentation by Tim O’reilly from OSCON 2010… enjoy Tim’s talk as he talks about the Internet, the future, the cloud, open source, technology and more… (See more videos from OSCON on the O’reilly YouTube Channel)

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Fedstats’ Mapstats for Kids is a collection of interactive games created to teach concepts about maps and statistics. It is based on the national standards for geography, math, and statistics. The characters are called Globie (maps) and Stixie (statistics).

Here’s an interesting opportunity for Earth Imagine experts to win something very cool from DigitalGlobe – For the first-time ever, remote sensing and GIS researchers have access to high-resolution imagery with 8 spectral bands, including coastal blue, yellow, red-edge and NIR2. Do you have a valuable application to use this new data?Enter the 8-Band Challenge [...]

New from GeoSage, a Single Global Satellite Imagery Mosaic of 2.29 Terabytes. Earth Land Surface (ELS) 2000 Version 2, consists of (1) natural-color, near-global satellite imagery tiles at 15/30/60/90m resolutions, and (2) a unique, seamless, global satellite imagery mosaic at 30m-resolution with the file size of 2.29 Terabytes or 2,290 Gigabytes (image size: 1,296,000 by [...]

Times are tough for everyone and just because business has maybe taken a hit that doesn’t mean it’s the end of the World. This is a great time to innovate and it may also be the perfect time to implement some new ideas into your business, most notably,  ideas that support your greatest asset – [...]

With “father of GIS” Roger Tomlinson receiving the National Geographic Society’s Bell Medal earlier this month, the “local-boy-makes-good” story is inevitable: the Ottawa Citizen has a profile. (This is not his first major award; he’s already got the Order of Canada, which, for those of you who are not Canadians, let me tell you, is as big a deal as it gets up here.) Via Matt Artz.

Previously: NGS Awards Medals to Tomlinson, Dangermond; “Data for Decision”: GIS on Punchcards; Roger Tomlinson: The Father of GIS.

Ottawa Citizen Profiles Tomlinson first appeared on The Map Room: A Weblog About Maps on July 28, 2010. Copyright © 2010 Jonathan Crowe. Distributed under a Creative Commons licence.

Londonist has put together a directory of online maps of London. Via geoparadigm.

Londonist’s Directory of London Maps first appeared on The Map Room: A Weblog About Maps on July 28, 2010. Copyright © 2010 Jonathan Crowe. Distributed under a Creative Commons licence.

It's been a while since Google has added any new cities to their Building Maker tool, but now two more have joined the mix - Santiago and Valparaiso, Chile.

These two cities bring the total available in Building Maker up 94. I'm always happy when they expand the coverage to more cities, and I look forward to seeing them expand the coverage area for existing cities a bit further.

Google has pointed out that a few users have been building a lot of models in the area over the last few years. In particular, 'gananunez' has created over 50 models in Valparaiso and users 'GecKo StuDio' and 'Sergio' have been creating various buildings in Santiago for the last few years. Having their buildings in the area will be a great start as other users start to fill in the cities with new Building Maker cities.

You can read more about the new cities in the Google Lat Long Blog. To try it yourself, simply visit the main Building Maker site.

A show floor conversation with John Frandsen of Old Town Creative about their CMS Geoconcensus

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

So with great interest I read Marten’s blog post on the new Data.gov “Geo Viewer”.  Marten’s got a ton of reasons why its great and why it fails, but for me it didn’t work at all.  I just get this FAIL message below:

I mean maybe I could figure out what went wrong, but since Data.gov gives me no details about datasets I just move on.

Of course it could be one of the many problems Marten showcases, but I will say the “share this” works great.  In all seriousness putting a “preview” map on Data.gov isn’t going to change a thing about how worthless Data.gov is for actually finding data.  You can of course put your comment in the little box at Data.gov and I’m sure they’ll forward it on to “top men”.

Of course this brings up a huge point with how big a failure Data.gov has been.  Just going to the “Ideas” page for Data.gov, you are presented with a big middle finger.

What would I like Data.gov to look like in July 2010?  No really, I totally trust the government to do right by data.  Nothing says that nobody from the Data.gov crew looks at that Ideas page more than that simple statement.  Rather, it is more of an exercise to make citizens feel part of the process, distracting them from actually doing something about it.  Maybe it would be better to just go through ESRI to get things fixed.

The folks at Penn State Public Broadcasting are in the middle of creating a series of videos showing how geo-spatial technology is changing the world we live in.

They've released a five-minute video showing some of the content that will be in the series, and it's a great little video. Check it out:

According to their website, they have a list of problems that are aided heavily by geospatial information, such as:

• fight climate change;
• map populations across continents, countries, and communities;
• track disease;
• strengthen bonds between cultures;
• defend the nation;
• assist first responders in protecting safety;
• enable democracy;
• navigate our personal lives.

They plan to release the first episode in mid-September of this year, and we'll certainly be keeping an eye out for it. In the meantime, check out their site or follow them on Facebook or Twitter for the latest updates on the status of the project.

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

The Rideau Canal is a World Heritage Site waterway which connects Canada’s capital Ottawa to the city of Kingston on Lake Ontario. The route consists of a combination of several lakes, numerous rivers and dams, and 19km of man-made canals, featuring 45 locks.

Used today for recreational boating, the Canal was constructed in the early 19th century for military use. Supply ships from the British-controlled Upper Canada were under threat from American forces in New York state if they travelled from Kingston to Montreal along the Saint Lawrence River. The Rideau Canal allowed boats to travel safely north to the Ottawa River then east to Montreal.

Lieutenant Colonel John By of the Royal Engineers was given the unenviable task of creating the Canal in an inhospitable landscape of rock, swamp and forest, while receiving insufficient funding from the British government. His achievements led to the naming of the fledgling community as Bytown, though it was renamed to Ottawa in 1855.

Our tour of the 202km long waterway begins in Ottawa with the flight of eight locks¹ that lift boats 24m from the Ottawa River to the section of Canal which runs through the capital’s downtown. This man-made section bypasses the rapids at Hog’s Back and the waterfall where the Rideau River meets the Ottawa River.

Winter temperatures (and a good deal of maintenance work), transform a 7.8km length of the canal into the Rideau Canal Skateway – the world’s largest skating rink². Each year tens of thousands of people enjoy outdoor skating during the Winterlude festival.

Street View visited Ottawa in the early spring, after the ice had melted but before the water levels were allowed to rise for boat traffic. We can still see – from the road named in honour of the Canal’s creator, Colonel By Drive – the temporary huts installed each winter which allow skaters to thaw out their toes, or warm up with hot chocolate and the local delicacy, Beaver Tails.

South of Hog’s Back, the route is taken over by the Rideau River which takes boaters through a number of communities and seven more locks on the way to Merrickville. Here we find the distinctive and imposing Blockhouse, constructed in 1832 to protect the locks from American attacks. Today it serves as a museum.

While many mills were destroyed in the construction of locks along the system, the mills at Merrickville were preserved, only to be put out of business a couple of decades later when a large rail hub developed in nearby Smiths Falls. Here, a new large combined lock was built in the mid-1970s to replace three old locks, resulting in the highest single lift (almost 8m) of all the locks in the system. We can only see the last of the three old locks, but the difference in depth of the new lock is clearly apparent.

There are many different types of bridges along the Canal, including swing and lift bridges which open to allow larger boats to pass. Smiths Falls is also notable for the Scherzer rolling-lift rail bridge (visible here beyond the ‘detached’ lock) which was built apart from the road bridges to reduce the need for bridge openings. The rail line was closed many years ago and the bridge is now permanently raised.

Travelling south-west from Smiths Falls, the Canal passes through a series of lakes, connected by rivers and man-made channels. The lakes are popular vacation spots, and many are lined with cottages or summer homes. Big Rideau Lake is the largest body of water along the route.

Newboro is the highest point of the Canal and one of the locations where the difficult history of its construction is most renowned, both in terms of the labour required and the human cost.

Surveyors originally expected an easy cut across the isthmus between Mud and Rideau lakes, but workers encountered significantly more rock than was expected, which led to painfully slow progress. At the same time, malaria struck the workforce and their families, with hundreds dying from the disease from 1828 to 1830, while many others deserted to escape the terrible camp conditions. In total more than a thousand people are estimated to have died from disease and accidents during the construction of the Canal. There are memorials to these fallen workers in both Ottawa and Kingston.

Many years later, in 1966, the Newboro lock met with controversy when it was the first to be converted from manual to electric operation. Boaters and residents near all the lock stations felt that removing manual lock gates would forever change the character of the Canal. Opposition was sufficient that only two other locks have been converted since then.

The passage into Lake Opinicon³ also gave the engineers considerable trouble, though the situation was eased when mill-owner Samuel Chaffey died of malaria, at which time his widow sold the land to allow an easier location for the lock, now known as Chaffey’s where there is a swing bridge over the lock, and a defensible lockmasters house, which is also now a museum.

The Jones Falls area was another difficult situation for By to surmount, with numerous options being explored to bypass the rapids. Eventually a dam was constructed, standing over 18m tall and 65m wide, though the stone in the area was unsuitable meaning the rocks for the dam had to be quarried some distance away. Four locks allow passage into Whitefish Lake.

Passing through a couple more lakes, the Upper and Lower Brewers Locks, and a stretch of the Cataraqui river, brings us to Kingston Mills, the final flight of four locks which allow boaters to continue downstream. Eventually they pass beneath the slightly rusty beams of a final lift bridge⁴ to access Lake Ontario.

The Rideau Info site is an excellent resource with a detailed history section – including a biography of Colonel By, and information about each lock station, both practical and historical.

Thanks to MatB.

Locations: Ontario / Categories: Bridges, Buildings, Natural Landmarks, Street Views, Structures, Watercraft, World Heritage Sites

View in Google Earth

How can I take part?

Want to add your sounds to the map then follow these steps;

1. register with AudioBoo
2. record & publish
3. listen to soundscapes

Ways to record and publish

Listen to soundscapes

• Just record your everyday surroundings.
• What do your home, leisure and work environments sound like?
  
  
  
  • What sounds define these places and how do they make you feel? Some may be restful, some unpleasant - let us know why.
• Does the sound of these places differ during the day?
  
  
  
  • What are the differences? Let us know what these sounds mean to you.
• Where are the noisiest or quietest parts of your locality?
  
  
  
  • What makes it so noisy? What can be heard even when it's quiet?
• Make as many recordings as you like at different locations and times.
• Each recording may be up to 5 minutes long.

Mapperz Mapping News Blog

Suomi-Neito is a distant, but weirdly parallel echo of ‘Paula’, the personification of Brazil’s Sao Paulo state (discussed in #471). Female like most other anthropomorphic representations of geographic entities (1), this Finnish Maiden shares with Paula the extra distinction of not only symbolising her nation, but also literally coinciding with its geographic shape.

The Finnish Maiden reminds me of the lament by a Finnish friend, a bachelor recently returned to his home country after years of working abroad: “All the women in Helsinki look identical. It feels like you’re going out with the same woman over and over again.” A luxury problem perhaps, as that same woman probably looks a lot like the Finnish Maiden: a tall, blonde, blue-eyed woman in her mid-twenties (braided hair, bare feet and folkloristic costume in the national blue-white colours are optional).

Although eternally young, the Finnish Maiden is older than the Finnish nation. She was devised to represent the longed-for national independence in the 19th century, when Finland was still a Grand Duchy in the Russian Empire. The shape of that Grand Duchy inspired the conceit of seeing her as the country itself, with both arms raised. Eastern territories lost by Finland tothe Soviet Union in 1944 meant the Maiden, facing the viewer, also lost her raised left arm (2).

Nowadays, Suomi-Neito is usually presented as follows: Finland’s westward protrusion into the Gulf of Bothnia is the Maiden’s wind-blown skirt, the narrower middle of the country her small waist, the northernmost bulge of Lapland her head and the narrow region branching out towards the northwest between Sweden and Norway her waving right arm. The identification of this region with its anthromorph equivalent is such that the area, officially the commune of Enontekiö, is commonly referred to as Käsivarsi (‘The Arm’).

Many thanks to Kevin Axe for sending in this map, found here on Come to Finland, a website (and a book) devoted to the art of Finnish tourist posters. The map and the maiden were produced in 1948 by Finnish artist Olavi Vepsäläinen (1927–1993).

¹ see also Marianne (France), Mother Russia, and a host of Roman-sounding ladies such as Germania, Hibernia, Polonia, Helvetia and Britannia; male counterparts include Johnny Canuck (Canada), Deutscher Michel (Germany), Uncle Sam, John Bull and Juan de la Cruz (Philippines).

² the area known as Petsamo in Finnish, now the Pechengski District in Russia, which while in Finnish possession granted Finland access to the Barents Sea, at the same time denying the Soviet Union a common border with Norway. The situation was reversed when the area was ceded to the Soviet Union after Finland’s defeat in the Continuation War (1941-1944), together with other areas further south, most notably a large part of Karelia in Finland’s southeast. This Wikimedia Commons map shows the location of Petsamo (in yellow), plus a small area pre-ceded by Finland to the Soviets in 1940 (in green) and another area sold by the Finnish to the Soviet Union in 1947 (in red). Petsamo, incidentally, is the birthplace of an actress who popularised an esthetic diametrically opposed to the wholesome, blonde, outdoorsy one symbolised by the Finnish Maiden: Maila Nurmi (1922-2008), better known as the raven-haired, black-clad pre-goth Vampira.

As the saying goes, a picture is worth a 1,000 words.  Via The Telegraph UK

Image created by Electro Optic Systems out of Australia

A couple of interesting global maps were posted to NASA’s Earth Observatory site earlier this month: land surface temperatures for early July 2010 and, above, aquatic dead zones — “areas where the deep water is so low in dissolved oxygen that sea creatures can’t survive.” Both maps are compiled from MODIS data from the Aqua and Terra satellites.

Aquatic Dead Zones, Etc. first appeared on The Map Room: A Weblog About Maps on July 26, 2010. Copyright © 2010 Jonathan Crowe. Distributed under a Creative Commons licence.

Google Maps Mania links to resources on how to create an isochrone map — i.e., a map that shows travel time from a given point by drawing lines like topographic contours — within the Google Maps environment.

Isochrone Maps in Google Maps first appeared on The Map Room: A Weblog About Maps on July 26, 2010. Copyright © 2010 Jonathan Crowe. Distributed under a Creative Commons licence.

A recent story by National Geographic highlights how researchers used Google Earth to discover one of the newer craters on Earth; only a few thousand years old.

As Stefan at Ogle Earth notes, the findings of some researchers were recently published in the journal Science, they require a subscription. Fortunately, he was able to grab the coordinates of the crater so you can see it for yourself. Simply fly to 22º 01' 06" N 26º 05' 15" E or use this KML file to take you there.

Of course, there are hundreds of known craters all across the planet. One of Frank's oldest posts showcase them, and you can download this KML file to view them all in Google Earth.

What is the most interesting crater that you've found in Google Earth?

A VerySpatial Podcast

Shownotes – Episode 262
July 24, 2010

Main Topic: Our conversation with Robert Cheetham of Azavea

Click for the detailed shownotes

Music

News

• Software
• –General mix

Sponsored by ITT Visual Information Solutions and their product ENVI EX

Web Corner

Main topic

Tip of the Week

Events

This week A Very Spatial Podcast is sponsored by ESRI.

Introduction to Geometrical and Physical Geodesy: Foundations of Geomatics, a new book by Esri Press, provides an overview of geodesy, the discipline dealing with the measurement and representation of the earth. To read an excerpt from the book or for more information, visit www.esri.com/esripress.

I'll be traveling through Xinjiang these next few weeks — to Ürümqi, then by train to Kashgar, or at least what's left of it before the old town is completely razed. From there, I hope to make it to Tushuk Tash, the world's tallest natural arch — you can stick the Empire State building under it. With some luck, I'll bring back 360-degree panoramas of all these places.

Considering that all of Xinjiang was completely without internet most of the past year (there were some troubles) I likely won't be online all that often. Needless to say, if something happens to Google Earth in the meantime, you won't read about it here. See you in a few weeks.

Comments (1)

Mapperz Version, styles and fills changed, though seems slower, compare the difference.

var map = new Map('map', [
    // country shapes
    new Layer('http://mapperz.110mb.com/shape/110m_admin_0_countries', 

{ fillStyle: '#76e97c', strokeStyle: '#18841D', lineWidth: '0.5' }),
    // dots for cities
    new Layer('http://mapperz.110mb.com/shape/110m_populated_places',

 { fillStyle: '#8A2BE2', /*textHalo: '3', textStroke: 'white',*/ textFill: 'rgba(255, 0, 0, 0.6)', 

textProp: 'Name', font: 'bold 9px sans-serif' })

  ]);

Mapperz Mapping News Blog

Freemasonry is the world’s largest and oldest fraternity. It’s also sort of hard to define. It’s a fraternal organisation, but it’s also bound up with ideas of morals, charity, and social gatherings.¹ For centuries, Masons have taken pride in constructing monuments to their brotherhood (although a common Masonic saying is “Freemasonry erects its temples in the hearts of men” or something similar). Let’s take a look at how some of these lodges and temples appear in Google Street View.

The largest Masonic temple in the world is in Detroit, Michigan. The temple opened in 1926, just a few years before the Great Depression began. Now, the massive auditorium is primarily used as a concert venue called The Masonic.

Modern Freemasonry traces its roots back to the formation of the United Grand Lodge of England in 1717. The U.G.L.E. is headquartered at Freemasons Hall in Great Queen Street, just off Drury Lane, in London.

Across the street from Freemasons Hall, you can see several of the regalia shops that cater to London Masons. These shops sell Masonic books, aprons, keepsakes and trinkets as well as the formal attire required for certain meetings.

In addition to craft lodges (or “blue” lodges), which confer the three degrees of Masonry (Entered Apprentice, Fellowcraft, and Master Mason), there are dozens of Appendant organisations for Masons to join. Two of the most well-known are the Scottish Rite and the Shriners. The U.S. has two governing bodies of the Scottish Rite, but the larger of the two is called the Southern Jurisdiction and its headquarters are in an impressive building in Washington, D.C., called The House of the Temple (Dan Brown fans might recognise it from The Lost Symbol).

Another fascinating (and massive) Scottish Rite Temple is in the unlikely location of Guthrie, Oklahoma. Part of the building once served as the Capitol of the state of Oklahoma.

Guthrie is a fairly small town in Oklahoma and you can see just how large the footprint of the Scottish Rite Temple is—it takes up several blocks of the town.

The Scottish Rite Auditorium in San Antonio, Texas, is one of the largest in the United States, and like Guthrie, it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Outside the U.S. and England, there are many fascinating Masonic buildings—of course, not all of them on Google Street View. In Toronto, there is a large, ornate building labeled “Masonic Temple” but it’s no longer owned by Masons, in fact, it’s now the headquarters of MTV Canada.

Many of the former British colonies have long histories of Masons establishing lodges in the far reaches of the world. Here’s the Masonic Hall in Hong Kong:

These are just a few of the examples of the literally thousands of Masonic temples around the world. Do send in your favourites!

Locations: District of Columbia, England, Hong Kong, Michigan, Oklahoma, Ontario, Texas / Categories: Buildings, Street Views

View in Google Earth

After what feels like months of work¹, we’ve finally launched our brand new design for Google Sightseeing (14 weeks after we originally planned to launch it, on our 5th birthday).

Today we’re very proud to bring the new design to everyone. Here’s some of the highlights:

• Embedded maps and streetviews on all articles
• We’ll be able to have larger thumbnail images on future posts
• Links in posts indicate if they’ll take you to our map page to view the location full screen
• Embedded Streetviews that we’ve published on our Twitter page²

Some of you have been helping us beta test the new site over the last few weeks, and thanks to your passionate feedback, we’ve made a number of improvements based on your ideas; providing a cleaner, less cluttered layout, as well as better compatibility on smaller screen sizes.

We’d still love to hear your feedback and ideas for further developments over at our feedback forum, and we’ve got even more improvements lined up now that the new design is in place.

We’re also going to be running another recruitment drive for freelance writers to become part of the team here at Google Sightseeing, so that we can increase the amount of articles we can publish. Contact us for more details if you’re a budding technology/travel writer!

Thanks for your patience during this transitional period, we’ll get back to posting sights now…

Locations: England, Scotland / Categories: Site News

View in Google Earth

Researchers scouring Google Earth for impact craters have discovered a new one in Egypt, National Geographic reports. Dubbed the Kamil Crater, it is small but very special, because it really is new, in geological terms — just a few thousand years old. So new, in fact, that the elements have not yet been able to erode the ejecta rays. On site, the researchers have been able to collect thousands of space rocks.

These findings were published just yesterday in the journal Science. The full text article requires a subscription, but the supporting online material does not. This material includes satellite images of the crater that contain coordinate information. So without further ado, here's the crater on Google Maps:

View Larger Map

It's a real beauty, and it really is in the middle of nowhere. The imagery we see currently in Google Earth/Maps was collected on May 21, 2006.

[Update 0546 UTC: Some more crater links:
This page explains that the crater was first noticed in February 2009, and confirmed on-site in February 2010. Here's the official page for the crater, labeled Gebel Kamil, at the Meteorological Society. Some guy on Ebay is purporting to sell pieces of the ejecta found at the crater site. It sounds dubious (what's with the piaster notes?), but the page has a good aerial image of the crater:

(Click to enlarge)]

Comments (1)

Now you might be asking, why would some obscure ESRI extension supporting 9.3.1 be news? Well if you work with NITF data, it is important to you. Plus you are probably on a government computer and ArcGIS 10 is a distant dream.

Anyway NITF for ArcGIS now support 9.3.1 so if you are rolling with ArcGIS 9.3.1, you can now work with NITF again. Hold the line guys!

Google Lat Long Blog has announced new, improved borders for the default dataset of Google Maps (and soon Google Earth). This is much-anticipated news, because many have begun to see Google's border choices as a proxy for international recognition of sovereign territorial claims, with perceived errors loudly contested by aggrieved parties, sometimes even by governments.

As Google's announcement clarifies, the improvements are of several types — increased resolution, changed symbology, and changed borders:

Increased resolution:
In some cases, the resolution of the border is improved, increasing accuracy. Google's post shows an example of this in the Pamirs. From a quick visual inspection, higher accuracy is also visible in the border between Azerbaijan and Armenia. The border between Vietnam and China is also much more detailed — the rougher version of this border prompted a complaint by Vietnam in March 2010 that several of their border towns fell into the Chinese side of the map. That has now been fixed:

Before:

After:

There are likely many other instances of such improved borders around the world. (It would be great to get a list or KML file of these changes, just as Google does with imagery updates, for the sake of transparency.)

Changed symbology:
Google writes that some borders, while not changing shape or resolution, have been given a different symbology, to more accurately reflect their status. As an example, Google proffers a section of the border between Somalia and Ethiopia, which is now accurately shown as "disputed".

A quick perusal of another disputed border in Africa, however, leads to a problematic change in the symbology. The Ilemi Triangle is claimed by Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya, but is de facto controlled and administered by Kenya. The current view in Google Earth recognizes this:

(In fact, it might even be better to show the Sudanese and Ethiopian borders of the area as orange, as that is where the "line of control" is for Kenya. For a guide to what the colors (red/orange/yellow) mean, see Google's explanation.)

In Google Maps, however (and I assume soon in Google Earth), it appears as if the disputed triangle has been handed to Sudan:

While this change surely is unintentional, the removal of the Sudanese line and the "hardening" of the Ethiopian line can easily lead to mistaken interpretations.

Changed borders:
Google's announcement uses a disputed island straddling the Uruguay-Brazil-Argentina border as an example of how new information has led to qualitative changes in map borders. There is another example in South America — the border between Chile and Argentina has become more accurate, but also, surprisingly, has changed shape. Back in 2007, the Chilean border town of Villa O'Higgins was accidentally placed in Argentina and labelled as such. The error was soon corrected with the border that until now looked like this in Google Earth:

The new version of the border, already visible in Google Maps, looks like this, with further changes up and down the line:

I trust that this latest (third) Argentina-Chile border dataset is to everybody's liking, as it is not marked as disputed:-)

One place where nothing has changed (as far as I can tell) is in the depiction of the disputed borders between China, India and Pakistan. Arunachal Pradesh is still shown as disputed, with both Chinese and Indian claim lines given equal weight, just has it has been since 2009.

Some Indian bloggers, however, on reading Google's announcement and checking India's borders, are discovering anew Arunachal Pradesh's disputed status, and are not liking it one bit. Trak.in:

I, for one can understand Jammu & Kashmir to be shown as disputed (although, I think only northern part should have been show as disputed), seeing Arunachal Pradesh under dispute is not something I can digest.

Pluggd.in:

Seems like the error in data processing is part of their ‘batch processing’ mistakes? Or an attempt to please Chinese government [J&K dispute is well understood and most of the international news sites shows J&K as disputed area, but not Arunachal Pradesh].

Relax, guys, nothing's changed. In fact, Pluggd.in noted themselves back in October 2009 that the the international version of Google Maps shows Arunachal Pradesh as disputed. You might not like it, but you can't act surprised.

One thing Google could do, however, to make their map of Arunachal Pradesh more accurate, is to draw India's claim line in orange, not red, because India is the de facto administrator of the region, whereas China "just" claims it. (Same goes for Aksai Chin, which China controls but India claims.)

Preah Vihear:
In February 2010 Cambodia vocally protested the depiction of its border with Thailand in Google Earth, especially around the temple of Preah Vihear. (All the gory details are here.) Basically, the demarcation line did not show that the area around the temple is disputed, instead opting to show the maximalist version of Thailand's claim:

Now, it looks like this in Google Maps:

It's an improvement. Still, the road coming in from the left is completely inside Cambodian-controlled territory, so the dotted dispute line should be longer. Also, there is a Cambodian claim line and a Thai claim line — we already know the contours of the Thai claim line, so why not just add the Cambodian claim line and show both in red in Google Earth?

Elsewhere, you can see that the resolution of the border between Thailand and Cambodia has been much improved. Here is the change around the Ta Muen temple complex, which straddles the border further to the west:

This and other temple complexes along the border have become more heavily contested in the wake of the controversy surrounding Preah Vihear.

Perfection is elusive when mapping, but it is good to see that Google is spending resources on improving the depiction of borders in Google Earth and Google Maps.

[Update 2010-07-22: A Google spokesperson writes:

"I just wanted to clarify one point regarding the Ilemi Triangle: as part of this update, we have revised this area to depict the 1938 "Red Line." This line is considered to more accurately reflect which country controls which portion of the area."

Several independent online resources all state that Kenya is the de facto administrator of the entire area, but I will read up more thoroughly on this dispute before reporting back.]

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The other day Axis Mapper Dave was working with styled maps in the Google Maps API and made a brief styling mistake—all the small roads disappeared but their one-way arrows remained.

It was actually kind of an interesting perspective on the street system, a stripped-down view of engineered traffic patterns or perhaps a measure of the confusion facing unseasoned motorists. Sure enough that same evening saw me driving in circles because of one-way streets in a place where I’d ordinarily be on foot. And in Madison, Wisconsin, pictured above, in spite of the relatively few arrows on the map it can be surprisingly complicated to cross the isthmus if you don’t start from the right spot. Anyway, with these thoughts in mind naturally I stole Dave’s styling code and tried to blank out everything else to leave nothing but arrows from one-way streets.

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem possible to do this completely with the Google Maps style options, and my samples below involved a little editing to remove yellow streets. I couldn’t figure out a way to make the “arterial” category of streets white without also turning their arrows white. Cloudmade’s style editor, meanwhile, can do that but can’t yet remove street labels. This bare-bones map is the best I could do with Google Maps; the arterial streets are just turned off entirely, leaving a mostly white-and-arrows map at the largest scales.

Whereas I have previously tried to make a map into a musical instrument, I picture these maps as dance steps. It looks easy to do the Brooklyn, but it’d take some skill to dance the Paris. I’m not about to try it myself, but when geography-based dancing sweeps the nation, I demand royalties!

Pictured at top: dance steps in the sidewalk on Broadway in Seattle, by Flickr user DrewToYou.

This gleaming expanse of white marble is the Sheikh Zayed Mosque in Abu Dhabi.

It is particularly gleaming, and spectacularly white, because the $2billion no-expense-spared project entailed shipping in the purest white stone known to man, all the way from Macedonia.

Twenty seven other varieties of marble were used in the building, along with many semi-precious stones, such as can be seen in the floral patterns of the courtyard thanks to Google’s excellent high-resolution images.

In addition to the 9,000 capacity of the mosque, the courtyard can hold up to 32,000 worshippers. The mosque is also the burial location of the Sheikh for whom it is named – the founder and first leader of the United Arab Emirates.

While some sources say he is buried in the courtyard, others say his tomb is this smaller building in a garden with reflecting pools to the north of the mosque.

The mosque is flanked by four 115m minarets and eighty domes of various sizes.

The lavish expenditure extends to many aspects of the building. While not the largest mosque in the world¹ it does have a couple of record-breaking features, both of which cost over $8million.

1) The world’s largest carpet – weighing more than 42,000 kg and created with over 2 billion knots.

2) The world’s largest chandelier – finished in gold, holding 40 million pieces of crystal, and measuring 10 by 15 m.

Naturally, such a building needs huge parking lots, with one on either side of the building. There’s also a helicopter landing pad for those for whom road travel is just too inconvenient.

The interior is spectacular, with 1,000 columns, gold glass, and a wall featuring the 99 names (qualities) of Allah (which has obligatory fibre-optic lighting). Somewhat ironically, these features are intended to be ‘subtle’ so as not to distract worshippers.

More information can be found at Wikipedia, and this site has some good information about the construction.

Locations: United Arab Emirates / Categories: Buildings

View in Google Earth

Apart from being a past sponsor of international terrorism and the West’s new best friend in North Africa, Libyan leader Muammar Gadaffi is also a crackpot dictator with the bizarrest imagination¹ this side—heck, any side—of Pyongyang. On foreign trips, the Guide of the Libyan Revolution, as he is called, habitually pitches a bedouin tent on the front lawn of a luxury hotel, sometimes even flying in camel mares for their fresh milk. But it’s doubtful whether Africa’s most colourful colonel will be pitching his tent on Swiss soil anytime soon.

Since July 2008, Gadaffi has been engaged in an ever escalating war of words with Switzerland. The arrest by Genevan police of Gadaffi’s son Hannibal and his wife for assaulting their housekeeping staff was a rather trivial matter in the grander scheme of international affairs. But Gadaffi decided to huff, and puff, and hit back with punitive economic measures against the Helvetians, not least the withdrawal of $5 billion from his Swiss bank accounts and the taking hostage of a few Swiss entrepreneurs on business in Libya.

Gadaffi cranked the level of unpleasantness up to 11 by advocating the partition of Switzerland along linguistic lines among its French, German and Italian neighbours²; stating that he would wipe the alpine confederation off the map even more thoroughly, if he only had the Bomb; and calling for an all-out jihad against Switzerland³.

How Gadaffi’s proposal for the dismemberment of Switzerland might work out. Map taken here from Wikipedia.

Not easily intimidated, the Swiss of late seem determined to grind Gadaffi’s gears, by advocating expansion rather than extinction for their Helvetic Confederation. Three separate, and from the Tent-dweller-in-Chief’s perspective rather irksome proposals have come to the attention of Strange Maps.

The first would correct the historic injustice of Savoy’s annexation by France. The Savoy⁴ was absorbed by France in 1860 after a rigged plebiscite returned an improbable 99.8% in favour of annexation. Not an option on the ballot paper: regaining independence or joining Switzerland. This first proposal would also see Franche-Comté⁵ transferring to the Swiss side. According to a September 2008 article on the Savoyard website RégionLéman.com, the French regionalist groups Savoie Europe Liberté and Mouvement Franche-Comté signed an agreement to conduct resolute and audacious actions against the centralist French state. The ultimate goal—libération—apparently is compatible with encantonment in Switzerland. It does seem compatible with Swiss wishes: according to an opinion poll, almost 44% of all Swiss already look favourably on annexing said territories, a percentage increasing to just under 56% when confined to la Suisse romande (French-speaking Switzerland).

This map shows Switzerland enlarged with French Savoy (to the south of Geneva) and the Franche-Comté (to the north of Geneva). Map taken here from the aforementioned Région Léman Website.

The second proposal, launched as recently as 12 June 2010, taps into regionalist sentiments on the other side of the French-Italian border, and proposes an Helvetic-Insubrian Confederation. Named after the Celtic Insubres, who dwelled in this pre-alpine area and reputedly founded Milan in 600 BC, the term Insubria formerly was used to mean Lombardy, or the Duchy of Milan. In recent decades, it has regained currency as the name for a Swiss-Italian Euroregion (since 1995)⁶, for local cultural associations, educational institutions, etcetera. Almost inevitably, the reawakening of an Insubrian identity snowballed into calls for political autonomy–on both sides of the Swiss border–among others by the group Domà Nunch⁷. The eco-nationalists (who commemorate the 1976 Seveso ecodisaster yearly as a kind of national day) habitually promote the idea of an Insubrian Confederation, modelled on the Swiss one to the north. The proposal of an Helvetic-Insubrian Confederation apparently was a response to expansionist noises from across the Swiss border⁸. Eager eco-nationalists started calculating the economic viability of such a Confederation, which would unite Insubrians on both sides of the border (and, incidentally, with a lot of non-Insubrians in Switzerland). The expanded Confederation would have over 15.5 million inhabitants, cover 53,700 km2 and would have a GDP of €600,000 million (almost $775.000 million), making it the 9th economy in Europe.

A map of ‘La Confederazione Elvetico-Insubre’, emblazoned with the Insubric word for “Let’s Unite”, and with the Insubrian insignia, which contains, horribly, a child-eating snake. These guys need a good PR agency. Map taken here from the Domà Nunch Website.

Although it doesn’t take in all the areas covered by the first and second proposal, the third plan is the most ambitious one. Launched in June of 2010 by the right-wing populist Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP), it would expand Switzerland into all its neighbours–except tiny Liechtenstein, which would be enclaved inside a truly Greater Switzerland. “We’re always discussing Switzerland joining the EU, never the other way around,” said SVP-president Toni Brunner, approving of to the proposal by one of his party-members. SVP-parliamentarian Dominique Baettig said he would neighbouring regions that “suffered under their national and the European political classes” to join the Swiss “democracy with a human face.” Ideally, he would like to see Switzerland snatch the Land Vorarlberg from Austria; the province Aosta, Varese, Como and Bolzano (‘Bosen’ in German) from Italy; the départments Jura, Ain, Savoie and Haute-Savoie and the région of Alsace (‘Elsass’ in German) from France. The single biggest chunk would be the German Bundesland of Baden-Württemberg, bringing in almost 11 million new Swiss citizens. If all went according to the Mr Baettig’s plan, the new, Greater Switzerland would count around 25 million inhabitants and would be a mid-sized European power to be reckoned with… at least by the Libyans.

The Greatest of the Greater Switzerlands, enclaving poor old Liechtenstein (between Vorarlberg and Switzerland’s former eastern border). Map taken here from the Swiss Tagesanzeiger newspaper.

Many thanks to Christophe Schmutz, Matteo Colaone and Jörg Raddatz for sending in these maps.

¹ Bizarrery too fantastic to pass up, but too extensive to list here. We recommend you Google/Bing/Yahoo it.

² At a recent G8 summit, Mr Gadaffi argued that Switzerland “is a world mafia and not a state [...] It is formed of an Italian part that should return to Italy, a German part that should return to Germany and a French part that should return to France.” Gadaffi overlooked the speakers of Rumantsch, Switzerland’s fourth official language (admittedly spoken by less than 1% of its almost 8 million inhabitants). If in the Gadaffi Doctrine language areas should become national borders, the Rumantsch should be granted their own little alpine republic (on the partition map above, the Rumantsch-speaking area in the country’s south-east is reallocated to Germany).

³ in February 2010, following the Swiss plebiscite that banned minarets.

⁴ actually only part of the Savoy; other parts of the historic region are at present Italian territory.

⁵ Franche-Comté also has a tradition of independent-mindedness. The name of the region refers to the ‘Free County’ of Burgundy, not to be confused with the Duchy of Burgundy.

⁶ For earlier treatments of Euroregions, see Strange Maps #86 and #163.

⁷ which means something like ‘Only Us’. Which sounds remarkably like the English translation of the Irish Sinn Fèin.

⁸ those noises were in fact Mr Baettig’s proposal–see last map–although they obviously were interpreted quite differently by the Insubrians.

• Google puts $1m into academic research projects for digitised books | Technology | guardian.co.uk
  Google Ancient Places is a Google-funded project to connect locations to their mentions in ancient literature, and then map them in Google Earth. Google tried a layer like this a few years back (see here) but it needed work. Perhaps this research grant will solve the semantic challenges.
• UK unveils Google Earth map showing temperature rises
  The UK's Foreign & Commonwealth Office takes a stab at raising awareness of the impending effects of global climate change, using Google Earth. (Press release here)
• Official Google Enterprise Blog: BlueSpace and Google Earth Enterprise: taking visualization to the skies
  Google Earth Enterprise shown being used as a unified aerial command-and-control visualization tool.

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The release of Google Earth 5.2 had a lot of new features, so many that we had to write three different blog posts just to cover it all. Well, OK, four with this one. One of the most exciting features from a developer standpoint is the new KML extension, <gx:Track>.

We wanted a better way to represent movement on and above the globe. Time animation works well, but from a KML standpoint it required very bulky files. In order to “move” a <Point>, you created a new <Placemark> for each time segment. Your <Point> didn’t actually move, it merely was replicated at a different place. This made animating your path rather cumbersome. Instead, we wanted a smoother experience, and one that allowed you to truly animate a <Geometry>. So, we created <Track>. To get a real sense of the power of <Track>, check out this video.

As you can see, a <Model> (a <Model> is a <Geometry> in KML) of an airplane moves smoothly along the <Track>. Let’s take a look at some KML:

<Placemark>
<name>My  first  track</name>
<styleUrl>#mytrackstyle</styleUrl>
<gx:Track>
<altitudeMode>absolute</altitudeMode>
<when>2010-04-07T23:30:55Z</when>
<when>2010-04-07T23:31:13Z</when>
<when>2010-04-07T23:31:32Z</when>
<when>2010-04-07T23:31:52Z</when>
<when>2010-04-07T23:32:11Z</when>        ...      <gx:coord>-83.671639  1.675732  7.827881000000001</gx:coord>
<gx:coord>-83.67233299999999  1.675678  4.943848000000001</gx:coord>
<gx:coord>-83.672904  1.67574  3.982666</gx:coord>
<gx:coord>-83.67346499999999  1.675781  4.463257</gx:coord>
<gx:coord>-83.67400600000001  1.675855  3.501953</gx:coord>
   ...
<Model  id="model_2">
   ...
 <Link>
   <href>/Users/mmarks/Documents/track.kmz/files/mymodel.dae</href>
 </Link>
</Model>
</gx:Track>
</Placemark>

Track is a parallel array. The first <when> element matches the first <gx:coord> element, the second with the second, and so forth. The <when> element identifies the point on the time slider, and the <gx:coord> the matching location. Google Earth draws a line between each position visible in the time slider. Track also supports <gx:angles>, which allows you to define the heading of a model at any point along the way. If not defined in <gx:angles>, Google Earth will change the orientation of the Model based on the direction between the current position and the one previous.

Since you’re only creating one Track element, instead of re-creating a bunch of <LineString> elements for every time segment, your KML files will be much smaller. In fact, the more coordinates you have, the more benefit you’ll see from it.

One more feature that is really compelling is that you can add <gx:SimpleArrayData> elements to <SchemaData>. <gx:SimpleArrayData> allows you to add a matching array of your own data. In the sample posted here heart rate, cadence and power are added to each point, and when Elevation Profile is turned on in Google Earth, it allows you to view that data as well, as you can see below.

Mano Marks, Geo APIs Team

• Apple acquires web mapping firm Poly9, probably has something up its sleeve -- Engadget
  Poly9's product "Poly9 Globe" is self-described as a "cross-browser, cross-platform 3D globe which does not require any download." I suspect it is more of a presentation tool, though, and thus would improve on the maps currently in iMovie (which lack Great Circle animations between places!).
  
  Still, who knows what it might turn into when connected to Placebase, the other mapping company Apple has bought recently (though neither seems to have direct access to a repository of high resolution imagery, such as what Google and Microsoft have). I'll bet on one thing, though: Whatever comes out of this acquisition, it won't require Flash to run:-)
  
  One more thought: The more 3D globes the merrier — Google Earth and 3D Google Maps have been at it all alone in the mainstream web mapping space ever since Microsoft abandoned its 3D virtual globe in the latest iteration of Bing Maps.

Comments (4)

Sao Paulo is the only one of Brazil’s 26 states to include a map of the entire country on its flag; the Paulista state motto exhorts its citizens to Let great things be done for Brazil. And yet, Sao Paulo State historically harboured a more persistent regionalist, and even separatist sentiment than any other Brazilian state.

Sao Paulo is the richest, most populous state of the Brazilian federation. It is also the West’s most populous sub-national entity (*). At over 42 million inhabitants, Sao Paulo would rank 31st out of the world’s 223 independent countries, just behind Tanzania and right in front of Argentina. It would be the fifth most populous nation of the Americas (after the US, what would be left of Brazil, Mexico and Colombia). According to some reckonings (**), the eponymous state capital with its 11 million inhabitants is the biggest city in the Western world.

Population size isn’t the only thing that matters, though. Even back in 1842, when still very sparsely populated, Sao Paulo demonstrated the go-it-alone streak in its character by rebelling against the Emperor. The Paulistas expressed this streak politically by their adherence to the PRP (Partido Republicano Paulista), founded in 1873 to advocate the overthrow of the Empire in favour of a republican system.

When the republic of Brazil was eventually proclaimed in 1889, the PRP got its hands firmly glued to the levers of Brazil-wide power, which it shared with the PRM, from neighbouring Minas Gerais state. The arrangement saw the PRP and the PRM divvy up the presidency and political influence in the capital Rio de Janeiro. It was a cohabitation known as cafe com leite (‘coffee with milk’), as Sao Paulo’s economy was based on the former, Minas Gerais’ on the latter commodity.

This map celebrates Sao Paulo’s separateness from the rest of Brazil by portraying it anthropomorphically. The unnamed lady – let’s call her Paula – thus serves as Sao Paulo’s very own version of France’s Marianne or the UK’s Britannia: a symbolic female as allegory of the state’s unique history, territorial homogeneity and separate future. One could say it does so better than the French or British figureheads, as ‘Paula’ actually coincides with the borders of her state.

The emblematic female wears the state flag in her hair, but the slogan is not the one referred to earlier. It reads Everything for Sao Paulo. It would be interesting to learn how the PRP managed to balance the inherent separatism of its regionalist agenda with the demands – and the benefits – of its share in federal governance. Or maybe it didn’t, in the long run. For the PRP/PRM cohabitational system collapsed in the early 1930s, with the power-grab of Getulio Vargas, who abolished both parties and went on to establish a populist, authoritarian Estado Novo. The more regionally inclined elements in Sao Paulo State opposed this evolution. Incipient rebellion turned to inchoative secession in 1932, but the so-called Paulista War was crushed by federal troops in a few months’ time.

Many thanks to Vinicius Morello – definitely Brazilian and possibly Paulistano – for sending in this map.
——–

(*) and not the world’s, as reported earlier (see comments). And only if one excludes England, the grounds for which are somewhat debatable (i.e. England’s historic and demographic importance for the UK is such that it is more than a mere ‘sub-nation’).

(**) the ones that exclude the suburbs.

NOTE: WIFI ISSUES AT THE ESRI UC

I’ll be blogging the opening plenary this morning. Just refresh this page as the morning goes on and get the latest news.

8:30AM: Jack takes the stage and welcomes everyone to the 2010 ESRI UC, the 30th. Jack seems quite excited and wanting to get the message out. Jack goes into his highlighting of maps created with ESRI software. I’d personally love to see some historic maps that were highlighted at ESRI UCs past and show how far we’ve come.

8:35AM: Looks like the WiFi just crashed, so much for live blogging Some idiot is probably streaming video.

8:40AM: Abu Dhabi won the “Making a Difference Award” for building a geo-infrastructure using ESRI software. They view infrastructure as similar to the human body. Not too much detail there, but it is an interesting way to look at things, plus they seem quite successful.

8:50AM: The theme of the conference is “Vision”. Jack dropped into the concept of Computational Geography (which of course became GIS). Jack ties into the convergence of technology with geography at the middle. Jack views the key drivers as mobile, crowd-sourcing and other LBS technology to create a web-based geospatial platform.

9:00AM: Jack introduced a company called CityCourced which “mobilizes citizen involvement”. So its the idea where you and your GPS mobile phone are able to feed that data back to your “geodatabase”. Nothing really new here in concept, but it appears to be in the wild. Nice that they got a great speaking slot to introduce their product. Lets see if governments jump on this before saying it will change the world. I don’t see much here about cities that are getting involved with this product (if I’m filing a report, I want it to go to my city, not just sit on CitySourced servers). How they integrate into these cities will probably make or break the service. API is here.

9:05AM: Jack goes into crowd sourcing and social media. I always wonder how the geodatabase works with both? As long as you use their APIs.

9:07AM: ArcGIS 10 is outlined; Jack says it is easy, powerful and everywhere. ArcGIS is Desktop, Mobile or Web on Cloud, Enterprise or local. ESRI is focused on what Jack called “intelligent maps”. These are basically all the aspects of GIS and loaded into a map where you can interact, query or edit the map.

9:11AM: ArcGIS 10 has hundreds of improvements which ESRI says will improve productivity. Jack says ArcGIS is open; standards based and then open API’s.

Big news, ESRI is publishing their REST Interface as an Open Standard like they did the Shapefile.

9:14AM: ArcGIS Mobile is finally beginning to take off. iPhone, Windows Phone (LMAO), Android and of course the old ArcPad. This all ties back into Jack’s hope that citizens will use ESRI technology. Putting ArcGIS in the hands of everyone.

9:16AM: At ArcGIS 10, ArcGIS imagery support is very improved. From what I hear this could be the biggest raster release that ESRI has ever done. I’m not involved with imagery anymore, but it all looks pretty sweet.

9:20AM: Content is key and ArcGIS 10 brings ArcGIS.com into the desktop. The community basemap program got its own video. We’ve been talking about a national map, and it appears it took ESRI and their investment in the technology to make it happen.

Bing Maps is also free to all ESRI users including ArcGIS Server.

9:25AM: Bernie Szukalski gives his demo of the ArcGIS.com data using ArcGIS Explorer Online (or whatever they call it these days). The community basemap is just beautiful. I wonder if the City of Tempe takes part? The World Imagery basemap has really taken off. I’ve been using it instead of the Bing Aerial map because I think it is higher quality and it is free for anyone to use. ArcGIS.com has lots of great content including OpenStreetMap.

9:30AM: Break time – back at 10am for a look at ArcGIS 10.

9:30AM: Here comes the cloud. Jack says cloud computing will change the way we work, on-demand (of course ESRI licensing isn’t on-demand, but that is a story for another day). Really the story is extending existing deployments right now in 2010.

9:33AM: “The Next Big Step” — ArcGIS.com ESRI’s cloud storage solution today. What is interesting is that hosting is “coming soon”. ArcGIS.com will host your data simply and probably extremely cheaply. Glad I’m not a GIS hosting company. ArcGIS.com is a network of distributed services — as apps or maps. What is nice about ArcGIS.com is that the services are accessible via their APIs.

9:37AM: Bernie gets working again and shows the ArcGIS.com. The UI is nice, but it uses the weird star rating system. I think ESRI should just put a thumbs up button there. How does one rate a map with 5 choices? They say it is either one star or five stars. Just put a thumbs up button there and move on. Making a map with ArcGIS.com is simple and easy. Tags are weird as well, does tag searching work? Just use a search box to searchthe description.

Basically you discover data in ArcGIS.com and then add it to your basemap. You can add content via ArcGIS Online, the web or any ArcGIS Server (no WMS yet). Basically you end up creating a mashup you can share with others. These maps are also easily consumed in ArcGIS 10. ArcGIS Online is built into ArcGIS 10, so you can consume web services without leaving ArcGIS 10.

Bernie also demo’d the ArcGIS for iOS on the iPad. As I said earlier, the UI is just wonderful. Take note devs, this is how maps should be consumed on mobile devices.

9:50AM: Jack says ArcGIS opens GIS for everyone – clearly ESRI is focused on getting as many people using ArcGIS 10 as possible and easy to use clients is how it will be done. Will ArcGIS 10 transform GIS? We’ll see, but it sure will affect how everyone works with ArcGIS. He asks everyone to go to ideas.arcgis.com to help direct where ESRI goes with their software. I’m sure the site is therapeutic for many users

10:00AM: Break time!

10:30AM: ArcGIS 10 will be the focus for the next 90 minutes. John Calkins is out hitting on the point again that ArcGIS 10 is a complete system for geographic information. It looks like the focus is on abstract demos rather than just giving us the beef on ArcGIS 10 Desktop/Mobile/Server.

10:35AM: First up is productivity; ArcGIS 10 productivity highlights. Of course they do some sort of weird government demo of infrastructure. Searching is demonstrated, finding both datasets and symbol sets. Optimized Map layers allow you to load data into a group that allows you to pan around without refreshing of the data. The new editing tools are really slick, the template editing stuff really changes how you work, leveraging rules set in our geodatabase. The data validator extension is really useful because it finds and documents the issues in your data.

10:45AM: ArcGIS Mobile on a tablet running Windows XP? Sexy! Well now we are on to an ArcGIS Viewer for Flex and of course we see the edits made on the old busted Windows XP Tablet. What is nice is the same workflow that happens on the desktop comes across to the mobile. Same methods of editing on Desktop – Mobile – Browser.

10:52AM: Map Automation; ArcGIS 10 brings python into Desktop/Server. ArcPy could change how GIS Analysts work with data analysis. Bob Pool a GIS Manager from Washington State is giving the Python demo himself. Migrating AML to Python scripts is up first (Migrating AML’s in 2010?). Python editor is now built into ArcGIS 10. No one will be using VBA to automate ArcGIS Desktop moving forward.

11:00AM: Imagery demo is up now. ArcGIS Server can now render a mosaic on the fly. I’m out of my league here with imagery analysis, but imagery analysis inside a browser is impressive. The image analysis tools are nice because they can fix bad looking imagery. All done on-the-fly and with no modifications to the original data. What was the company called again that did image analysis? Erdas? They have no place in ArcGIS 10 anymore.

11:13AM: Network analysis improvements are the next demo. Network analyst has always been a hugely valuable. There has been much in the ArcLogistics area, but ArcGIS 10 doesn’t miss upgrades as well. The new Location-Allocation tool gives some great site selection tools to users. And that segue into an ArcLogistics demo. I love the ArcLogistics online (with Business Analyist Online, these two tools really just kick ass) and the simple web based tools are going to be analysis to anyone.

11:22AM: Apple iOS demos are next. Business Analyst Online (BAO) will be available soon for the iPhone/iPad for free. I love BAO in the web browser, but the iPad/iPhone app puts that power into your iOS device. Again, like ArcGIS for iOS, the UI is simple and easy to use. ArcGIS for iOS (which was demo’d earlier) was show again. Under featured content you’ll find a Rupert’s Places to go in San Diego available on your iPhone or iPad. Very nice!

10:26AM: 3D has been a big focus for ESRI at ArcGIS 10. You can now edit or perform analysis in 3D in ArcGIS 10. The problem I have with this is that you still need those ArcGlobe or ArcScene apps, why they can’t just roll it all into ArcMap is beyond me. 3D won’t be part of workflows if I have to start ArcGlobe/Scene every time I want to work with 3D data. The 3D demo was similar to what we’ve seen at the DevSummit/BPC, but at this point all this stuff is shipping. Support for SketchUp models is very welcome, but ArcGlobe is depressing.

10:36AM: Space and Time, 4D. Time in ArcGIS has always been somewhat of a PITA. I mean there has been NetCDF support, but the UI was never really aware of it. Now not only ArcGIS Desktop supports time, but the APIs do as well. Tweets to find oil demo was interesting, but I’m not sure it really shows off mobile analysis with social media. Time aware attributes are going to need to be entered with geo-data moving forward. Maybe ArcGIS 10.x can automatically tag edits (I know geodatabases can do this, but it should be done to any data edited in ArcGIS)

10:50AM: ESRI President’s Award went to the City of Frisco, Texas. Susan Olson, the GIS Manager for Frisco accepted the award.

11:00AM: Lunch!

You know you’re a map geek when you’re at Red Rock Canyon outside Las Vegas, walking across ground that is covered with thousands of stones, and what catches your eye is a single little rock that totally sorta looks like a map of Ohio.

(At the time you’re also wearing a t-shirt with a map of Wisconsin on a cow, obviously.)

Marten Hogeweg says that the ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap is available on CodePlex as an open source add-in.

Adds Marten:

If you want to contribute to documentation, best practices, or code, send your codeplex account to mhogeweg at esri dot com and I can add you to the list of contributors.

You Wichita lineman can get editing those OpenStreetMaps right away

I’ll be bugging out this weekend to San Diego for the annual ESRI love fest. If all this Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, Backchannel stuff has you screaming “no more”, don’t worry. I’ll be live blogging the show as usual starting Monday morning at the plenary. The UC can’t be placed in 140 characters so I don’t bother.

If you are going as well, feel free to stop by the WeoGeo booth where I’ll be most of the week or beers at night (heck do both).

Today is an important milestone here at Google and we’re all pretty excited - the Google Maps API turns 5! It was five years ago today that we posted a brief announcement to let the world know about the JavaScript Maps API and now 5 years later more than 350,000 active websites make use of it. Uses have ranged from tools that have made it easier to find an apartment, track the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and even make an Earth sandwich! Many, many more examples have been chronicled on sites like Mashable and the Google Maps Mania blog.

In 2005, Adrian Holovaty launched the first crime mashup that overlaid Chicago’s public crime data onto online maps providing Chicago’s citizens and journalists with a true picture of crime in their city. The site won the 2005 Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism and was named by The New York Times as one of 2005's best ideas.

In honor of this very special birthday, we took a chance to check back in with Adrian to see what he thought about the journey of the Google Maps API over the past 5 years:

Of my 11 years of doing Web development, Spring 2005 was the most interesting and exciting time. When Google Maps launched -- with maps assembled client-side, in JavaScript! -- I was one of the band of tinkerers around the globe who poked at Google's obfuscated code until we figured out how to embed their maps in our own pages. It was a ton of fun, not only doing the reverse engineering, but seeing the various discoveries and hacks other people were making: embedding multiple maps in a single page, swapping out the map tiles, using custom map markers, making markers move, loading real-time data onto maps... New discoveries were being made on a seemingly daily basis, and the best ones built on the other ones, which led to a sense of a community contributing to a greater understanding.

These days, it's hard to fathom a Web without embeddable maps. Wasn't it always that way? To Google's eternal credit, instead of shutting these hacks down, they recognized the demand and legitimized it in the form of their mapping API.

And the rest is... well, kind of boring in its simplicity, now that reverse engineering isn't involved. There was something raw and pure about those original hacks, like hunting and skinning your own food, living off the land, a digital self-sustainability. I feel like an old man yelling at kids to get off my lawn: ‘Back in my day, I had to reverse engineer Google's obfuscated JavaScript to get embeddable maps on my pages!’ You don't know how good you have it.”

The Google Maps API has seen some significant milestones of its own during the past five years. Some of the announcements we’re most proud of are the Maps API for Flash, Static Maps API, our Enterprise offering Maps API Premier, and the new Maps API v3, built with mobile use cases in mind and recently graduated from Code Labs.

The Google Maps API has established itself as the most popular Google API and the most deployed service-based API on the web. We continue to be amazed by how popular this API continues to be for web and mobile apps being developed today. This ProgrammableWeb dashboard shows that of the apps built and submitted over the past 2 weeks, a quarter of them make use of the Google Maps API. Click the 'All Time' tab and you'll see that nearly half of the almost 5000 cataloged mashups use it.

Today, on this 5 year milestone, we really have all of you to thank for this incredible chapter in web and mapping development. The remarkable levels of innovation, creativity and interest have come from all of you. You saw the possibilities the Google Maps API held and what it could be combined with to create, and you built it. Now join us to celebrate! Keir Clarke from Google Maps Mania has created a mashup that we want all of you to contribute to. Since we can’t all share a giant cake, I think it’s fitting that we all build a giant mashup of mashups to mark this special API birthday. Please tag your Google Maps mashup or tool to the map wherever you are:

We’re looking forward to the next 5 years of mapping innovation together with all of you!

Posted by Mike Pegg

Between 1934 and 1959, The Three Stooges produced 190 short films for Columbia Pictures. While all exhibited the Stooges’ trademark slapstick humour, gaining them a cult following, only one of the zany troupe’s shorts is of interest to the admittedly rather narrow field of curious cartography.
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Malice in the Palace (1949) is set in a fictionalised, funnified Middle East, where Moe, Shemp and Larry run the Cafe Casbah Bah. Two of their customers, Gin-A Rummy and Hassan ben Sober, are plotting to steal a giant diamond from the tomb of Rootentooten. However, when they discover the diamond is already in the possession of the Emir of Schmow, they start yammering and are kicked out of the Cafe. The Stooges then decide to retrieve the diamond themselves, using a map left behind by the unsuccessful plotters.
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MOE to SHEMP and LARRY: “Now, here, study this map closely!”
(Moe is now showing Shemp and Larry the route they are going to take to get to the castle as Moe is using a knife to lay out their travel route.)
MOE to SHEMP and LARRY:  “We start here at Jerkola, down the Insane River, over the Giva Dam, through Pushover, across Shmowland, to the stronghold of Shmow.”

The map, shown briefly in the film, is of a continentful of countries with strange names and odd shapes, clearly designed to look and sound ‘foreign’. What does this ‘Map of Starvania’, designed merely for the purpose of unsophisticated comedy, unconsciously reveal of mid-20th-century America’s attitudes towards the exotic, the un-American?
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Firstly, the name: Starvania. It continues the tradition of using vaguely latinate toponyms as shorthand for exotism. Previous examples include Ruritania, others are Syldavia and Borduria (all mentioned in #461). Intriguingly, by referring to ‘starvation’, this toponym may demonstrate a mental equation made by Americans between distance from their Land of Plenty and the incidence of famine (the greater the former, the likelier the latter). Considering that the Second World War had only recently ended, this might have indeed been a prevalent attitude in the US at the time.
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Secondly, the shapes: The Great Mitten floating around to the left of the main continent is of course a reference to Michigan’s lower peninsula (see also #454). Maybe not foreign, but at least a funny shape. The main continent is a profile facing left, attached to the bottom is an Italy-shaped boot called Hot Foot. Italy being the Old Country of so many Americans must have figured prominently in any brain-storming session on ‘foreignness’.
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Some of the foreign-looking names actually sound quite familiar; these are wordplays such as Isle Asker (“I’ll ask her”), Rubid-Din (“rub it in”), Cant Sea (“can’t see”) and the aforementioned Giva Dam (“give a damn”). Other plays on words, sounding less foreign, are Bay of Window (“bay window”), Corkscrew Strai(gh)ts (a corkscrew being the opposite of straight), and Hot Sea and Tot Sea (“hotsie totsie”, for something or someone pretty).
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Other names are extended riffs on actual foreign toponyms: I-ran, He-ran, She-ran, They-ran and  Also-ran. Another set consists of Egypt, You-gypt and We-gypt (on the left, partly outside this image). The first set works a bit better than the second one, but both reflect an unfamiliarity with these foreign placenames.
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A further set of names reflect directly negative references, sometimes with the flavour of contemporary street vernacular: the Vulgar River (just north of Double-Crossea, on the right), the Insane River (running through Staywayoff, at the centre of the map), Jerkola, Slap-Happia, Hangover, Pushover.
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Least but not last, there are a few names that seem to reflect nothing much more than map-filling noise: Woo-Woo and Oomphola. Or the rudimentariness of these names might be understood to reflect on the lack of sophistication of the places they denote.
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A clever play on words is Mikey Finlen, referring both to Finland and to a ‘Mickey Finn’ – slang for a drink spiked to incapactiate its imbiber (hence “to slip a mickey”). Less clever: Lake of Lamb (“Leg of Lamb”, supposedly). Other names are self-explanatory, inexplainable or unreadable due to low image quality.
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Many thanks to William Angiolillo for sending in this map.

City skylines are one of my favorite types of scenic view. When planning to visit a new city, or even when looking to take some photos of a familiar city, I like to do some online scouting of good spots for a skyline view. I can recall several years ago browsing Google Earth, panning around and tilting the view to see terrain and guess at good vantage points. But by now Flickr users probably have just about every vantage point covered, so a more fruitful search can be done by looking at geotagged photos.

Out of curiosity I threw together some maps to show where most of the skyline views are, as defined by photos tagged “skyline” on Flickr. They are done in a sort of heat map style where brighter red and yellow indicates a higher density of photos, but they are neither real heat maps nor real density surfaces; rather they are many overlapping, mostly transparent dots, blurred a bit and mapped to a heat-like color gradient. There are no great insights that you can’t get from searching Flickr’s own maps, but it’s not bad for purposes like mine. I even learned of a new spot to check out locally; so it totally worked!

Here are some of the most photographed cities in North America, according to these guys. I did skip a few, but they tended to lack enough “skyline” tags to make for an interesting map.

New York: The brightest lights here are observation decks (the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center), where one can view the skyline from the sky’s perspective. New York has such an abundance of skyscrapers that it’s difficult to take in the whole skyline at once from the ground, but that’s no reason not to see the views that people are favoring along the East and Hudson Rivers.

San Francisco: This city is made for scenic urban vistas. I recognize Coit Tower and Alactraz here, and can see that Treasure Island affords a nice view, but there are also some concentrations closer to the center of the peninsula that are beyond my knowledge of the city.

Chicago: All things considered, Chicago gets my vote as the best skyline in the country. There are several predicable popular spots here, such as the Museum Campus, the Sears Tower (or whatever it’s called now), and the John Hancock Center. But most interesting is the hotspot on Millennium Park, and specifically on the Cloud Gate sculpture, a.k.a. “The Bean.” This is presumably one of the only spots among any of these cities where the majority of skyline photos are of a reflection.

Seattle: Seattle gives San Francisco a run for its money in terms of ideal scenic geography, with lots of hills and coastline. Head to Gas Works Park, the Space Needle, Queen Anne Hill, or, um, that area along the water to the southwest whose name I don’t know. Interesting to note here, as well as in San Francisco, are series of photos that follow ferry routes.

Boston: It’s a difficult skyline, with the two tallest landmark skyscrapers being in an otherwise smaller section separate from the main downtown skyline. Nevertheless there are views to be had. The Prudential tower and the Longfellow Bridge stand out the most here, the latter probably because its panoramic view is so often seen from subway trains coming up for air as they cross the river. Looks like people aren’t fully appreciating the glory of the BU Bridge, though.

Toronto: Toronto’s skyline has the privilege of being visible at great distances across Lake Ontario. Locally, though, the CN Tower is brighter than anything else on this map, but there are also some notable spots along the water’s edge in various locations. Of all the cities here Toronto is probably the least familiar to me; perhaps some readers can identify locations on this map.

Vancouver: My recollection is that Vancouver’s skyline is expansive but not terribly distinctive. But like the other west coast cities, its topography and coastline provide vantage points. The brightest points on the map are actually on land near the downtown area, but views across various water features prevail overall. I know the Stanley Park views and a couple of those to the west, but am otherwise unfamiliar.

Philadelphia: Of course the favored view is the one from the art museum, and of course all those photos are of somebody doing a Rocky impression.

Geometry riddle: When is a square not a square?
Answer: When it’s in New England.

Above (click for greater bigness) with the stupid title is a series of minimal street maps I traced to show the varied actual shapes of a selection of so-called “squares” in the central Boston area. Urban spaces come in all shapes, as you can discover with this nifty tool, and a city square in any part of the world is by no means guaranteed to be a literal square, but New England’s style of square is peculiar (at least in this country) in its especially confused geometry. Unlike many places where a square is most often defined by a public open space or civic structure, here a square is typically defined by an intersection of two or more—usually closer to 4 gazillion—thoroughfares and/or other streets. The square’s name further applies to a business district around that intersection, and sometimes to an entire neighborhood. Thus the squares strongly define much of the local geography and organization of Boston and its close surroundings, as you can see in the diagrammatic Unmapped Boston poster. They are many things, but rarely are they square. You’ll also find some Circles and Corners around town, but they tend to be a bit more true to their names.

Any locals out there can probably find fault with my selection here or with the extent of the individual square maps, but I’ve tried to capture the central intersections of many of the major players. The collection can always grow! Entertain yourself by trying to identify each square before consulting the list under the title. (Squares from Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, and Brookline are included.)

To everyone else: Sorry, I know you don’t care. But this city is just so mappable! (And in a way, undermapped.) You should come visit.

Previously: Squares can also be difficult to drive through, and they make good logos.

Edit: don’t hate me for this, but I’m in experimental stages of posting junk like this for sale at Zazzle, just in case anybody takes pride enough in their squares to put this on a t-shirt or poster. Something more professional and less desperate-looking will occur over time!

The latest issue of the The Cartographic Journal (of the British Cartographic Society) contains a paper written by Robert Roth, me, and Zachary Johnson entitled “Value-by-alpha Maps: An Alternative Technique to the Cartogram.” The value-by-alpha map is something I have touched on here several times over the past year and a half (as has Zach on his blog), and about which I spoke at last year’s NACIS conference in Sacramento. With the publication of this paper, it’s high time I explained what it’s all about.

Value-by-alpha maps (hereafter shortened to VBA), like everything noble and good, have their roots in somebody complaining about something on the internet—me, about election cartograms. Seeking an alternative to what I think are ugly and unreadable election results cartograms, I worked with my Axis Maps dudes to create a 2008 U.S. election map that used transparency rather than size to vary the visual impact of map units, thinking that avoiding the distortion of these units into unrecognizable sizes and shapes would make the map easier to read.

Rob Roth, a stellar Ph.D. candidate and shameless county collector at Penn State (studying under The Beard himself, the illustrious Alan MacEachren) became interested in further developing the idea academically and enlisted my Axis Maps partner and radical raw milk zealot Zach Johnson (who wrote his master’s thesis on cartograms) and I to collaborate on the now-published Cartographic Journal article. We were all graduate students at Madison together once upon a time, and we make a good team—striking a perfect balance between study, practice, and chili-eating.

Enough backstory. I’ll summarize at moderate length the idea and what we wrote.

WTF is a value-by-alpha map?

First things first: value-by-alpha is essentially a bivariate choropleth technique that “equalizes” a base map so that the visual weight of a map unit corresponds to some data value. Whereas cartograms accomplish this by varying size, VBA modifies the alpha channel (transparency, basically) of map units overlain on a neutral color background. Thus shapes and sizes are not distorted (except necessarily by the map projection, of course), but the lower-impact units with lower alpha values fade into the background and make for a map that is visually equalized by the data.

Solving Johnny’s Cube

To make a case for the limitations of cartograms, we point to Zach’s graduate work that compares several different types of cartogram designs. Zach developed a typology that describes cartograms in terms of three characteristics: shape preservation, topology preservation, and density equalization (basically a measure of how accurately the area corresponds to the data value; we’ve modified this to visual equalization to include more than just size variation). Depicted as a stylish and highly respectable cube, his typology reveals a back corner that is unattainable for cartograms, as none can be perfect in all three regards. Value-by-alpha, by leaving size and topology alone, allows us to nearly “solve” Johnson’s cube.

VBA works by wordplay

We must note that although creating VBA maps involves modification of transparency, the maps do not in the end symbolize via MacEachren’s visual variable transparency, which is more like a masking of one layer by another that is not aligned to it. Rather it’s two color variables, one of the late Jacques Bertin’s original graphic variables and a later addition—color value and saturation. In the end it is as though each map unit’s color was adjusted in value and saturation. “Value-by-alpha,” then, is an infinitely clever name (chosen by Rob) that refers to both numeric value (as in “value by area,” a term for cartograms) and color value.

Design considerations

On to the practical advice. There are basically three components to consider in the design of VBA maps: the modifying color, the equalizing variable, and the variable of interest.

The modifying color is the color that modifies the original unit color as its alpha value changes, i.e., basically the map’s background color. White or black are the only colors that make much sense here, as anything else will confuse hues and muddle the value and saturation too much. There is some difference in the way white and black affect value and saturation, but they both essentially map an overall “lightness” to the data (just in opposite directions). Black tends to make for a more striking map, I think.

The equalizing variable is the one that is symbolized by alpha and thus visually equalizes the map. First of all, this variable needs to be one of consequence to the variable of interest in order for the visual weighting and VBA altogether to make sense (e.g., counties with more voters are of more consequence to election results). With that out of the way, we recommend classifying the variable into five to seven classes. That number is pushing the limits of what can be visually distinguished, but we are suggesting some compromise for an improvement in aesthetics. To avoid units that are completely invisible, the lowest class shouldn’t have an alpha value of zero, but rather something in the 10–15% vicinity, from there stepping up to 100%. To assist with geographic context, we also suggest adding an outer boundary to the map units taken together.

The variable of interest is the variable being mapped with color and weighted by the equalizing variable. Because the alpha modifications introduce a lot of subtle variations in color, we advise a fairly limited number of data classes (unmodified colors) in this variable, specifically only two or three variants of each hue. For a sequential scheme that generally means two or three classes, and for a diverging scheme it means four to six. As always, ColorBrewer is the place to look for color schemes, a few of which are ideal for avoiding inherent lightness differences in hues that could upset the map’s intended visual hierarchy.

Below are some example color and alpha schemes, taken from ColorBrewer specs. Each is labeled with numbers that correspond to the intended visual hierarchy, where 1 should stand out the most, 2 the next highest in the hierarchy, and so on. Note that several colors may be meant to exist at the same level.

For the faint of heart

Cartograms are good for shock value. They’re an in-your-face radical perspective on a world you thought you knew, and they can really make a point. As a carto-curmudgeon, I remain meta-amazed by the amazement with which cartograms are received. We think that VBA can be a good choice when you want to show similar information but also want to be able to recognize what the hell you’re looking at. So when no shock is required, or it would hinder the intended map-use tasks, perhaps value-by-alpha can be your friend.

Limitations

Let’s be real—even I’m not convinced that VBA is broadly useful. We are proposing it and providing some theoretical support, but it is untested and carries important known limitations. It cannot be a universal replacement for cartograms, and we don’t want to imply that it is.

First, color value and saturation are not the most effective visual variables for encoding numerical data, certainly less so than size, which is what cartograms use. Furthermore they can’t as easily be tied to direct mathematical scaling as cartograms might. What all that means is that we can’t expect users of VBA maps to extract numerical estimations with much success, so the technique is best reserved for big-picture purposes, not precise comparisons.

Second, VBA is incapable of an important use of cartograms, which is to emphasize units that are small in area but thematically important, for example some of the European countries in the population cartogram below. VBA can only reduce the visual presence of a map unit, emphasizing the important ones only by diminishing the surroundings. Small geographic units may remain difficult to interpret.

Third, we can’t ignore varied unit sizes in a VBA map, just as in any choropleth map. Larger areal units carry a higher visual impact even if they are thematically less important, which is why some sort of standardization is generally encouraged on choropleth maps (e.g., mapping population per square mile instead of total population). Cartograms don’t have this problem, of course, because unit size represents thematic data, not geographic area. We didn’t really explore standardizing by area in VBA maps, but it may result in a more appropriately equalized map. However, standardization of the equalizing variable further hinders user estimation of data values in the map. For example in the election map equalized by population density below, it’s correctly visually equalized, but it’s not easy to compare one county’s impact to another’s because it requires calculating some combination of color and size.

Finally, there are display media issues that don’t exist with size variation in cartograms. The subtle variations in brightness and saturation in VBA are very difficult or impossible to hold constant in digital media. A map can look perfect on one screen and completely black on another. We got some feedback along those lines on the original election map. When you can’t control the display medium, a cartogram might be a better bet.

In action

Here I am obliged to point out that we’ve built value-by-alpha functionality into indiemapper, the Axis Maps web-based cartography application. Zach programmed most of that feature about an hour before my NACIS talk last fall. Otherwise, making a VBA map is simple: either programatically adjust alpha values of enumeration units or in a more graphical approach create layers for both the variable of interest and the equalizing variable, and use the latter to mask the former.

To close, it is worth providing an example of the value-by-alpha technique besides the election theme of everything posted so far. Below is a version of a map made by Rob Roth and Jin Chen at Penn State for some research they’re involved with. With a diverging color scheme it shows cervical cancer mortality rates by US county, above and below the national rate. Instead of using a VBA map to equalize by some variable of magnitude, this map uses it to display a measure of statistical reliability. A county’s alpha value corresponds to a score that indicates how reliably it lies in a cluster of elevated cervical cancer mortality, resulting in the spotlight effect on those important regions. Before I do more injustice to this work, check out the fully detailed poster (PDF) available on Rob’s ludicrously thorough online CV.

Paper citation

Roth RE, AW Woodruff, and ZF Johnson. 2010. Value-by-alpha Maps: An alternative technique to the cartogram. The Cartographic Journal. 47(2).

It is probably not permissible for me to post the paper online, but anybody who has read this far is probably an academic with access to the journal.

1. the accelerated growth in the number of investments made over the past five years
2. the size of each investment
3. the industry sector

1. the investor
2. the amount of the investment
3. when the investment was made
4. the industry sector

Hot on the heels of Google, Microsoft have released their tech preview of using Flickr photos with maps. Only using just Creative Commons photos, so feels a little more Opt-In.

More info here: Spatial Search: The Next Frontier

I think John Allspaw sums it up pretty well with …

“Fuck. Easily the coolest shit I have seen in a very long time.”

As did Aaron with “(this made my day)” …

This, is what geotagging photos is all about, it’s about having enough of them, millions and millions, so that they can be thrown through complex analysis, allowing them to be matched up, combined, calculated and computed into a geo-spatal context. It’s also about people sharing the world about them.

Start of mini rant

You’ll see that all these advances are made by Google and Microsoft, and in each case they’ve had to use the API (and thank fuck we have one!) to grab the photos, download them and process them.

Yahoo, who has direct access to all the photos and metadata, including extra EXIF data that you can’t get via the API, it’s just sitting there on the disks … isn’t … you may notice, producing any tech demos, or videos of its latest research.

I can’t even begin to say how frustrating this is, or at least was, I’m a little bit more over it now that I’m no longer working at Yahoo.

It is … there was … brickhouse … smart people, it … ah I can’t even find the words to fully explain it. Yahoo has let so many opportunities and good people slip through its fingers, that it makes me a little bit sick thinking about it.

So I’ll stop

End of mini rant

Anyway, great work Blaise and the rest of the team over at Microsoft. Thank you so much for doing what you’re doing.

Google have just updated their Street View to include Flickr Photos …

… you can see this in action here.

Flickr joins Panaramio and Picasa as a source of photos. Flickr has always had plenty of good quality geotagged photos, so this looks like a handy addition to the whole Street View thing. No word on how many Flickr photos they’ve used, or if it’s just for certain locations, but I’m sure there’ll be some official word at some point.

But wait, there’s more:

Flickr photos have also been crunched into google’s image brain …

… not only allowing for seamless picture-zooming between Flickr, Picasa & Panaramio photos, but it also means Google has a bit more understand of where a photo is and it’s context to the surrounding area than Flickr itself has. I guess this means they’ll make it onto the iPad version of GoogleMaps too.

Which is kinda neat.

Not quite sure how the copyright works out though. Traditionally image search results have shown thumbnails, which are fine as search results. Here fullsized images are being shown, and considering they must have been downloaded to be processed for the image-zoomy thing, they’re probably being served from Googles servers.

Haven’t sniffed the traffic while Flash loads them, so not sure yet.

Photos shown: seattle space needle #3 by lomokev & IMG_5811: Space Needle by ac4lt

(via Kellan)

From Working at Flickr to the new job at The Guardian … a not unsurprising transition.

I count myself as very lucky, to have been able to work on Flickr, something that has effected so many peoples lives, bend its code in unexpected and unusual ways and mainly work with <3 amazing people … and this is basically how it went …

“In addition to building, scaling, evolving, and generally being as loud and fast as we could possibly be with the original Ludicorp team, I had the absolute privilege to hire and work in the trenches with some of the greatest people on the web.” – John Allspaw

“It is difficult and sad to leave Flickr but I have no regrets. If you asked me whether I’d do it again and what I’d do differently I’d tell you that I’d do it again in a heartbeat and the only thing I’d change would be to try to do it harder and louder and faster than we already did.” – Aaron Straup Cope

It’s that, right there, the people, harder, louder, faster, and to quote another ex-flickr, if I may, George Oates, “I’ve been thinking about the design for my spaceship” oh wait, that’s not it … “Just Fucking Do It”, yeah that’s more like it.

So that was Flickr, and now I’m at The Guardian.

I would have written this “Hey I’ve got a new job at The Guardian” sooner, but then it involves the question of what I’m doing at The Guardian and it took a few weeks to figure that out, and you know, having a spare moment :) …

Take a look at Frequent Releases Reduce Risk, you can get through 154 slides surprisingly quickly fwiw. For those without the time to read it, it’s all about deploy many times, often and keep moving forwards. With that in mind …

• I work on the Internet == fast!
• I work at The Guardian == wtf, old lumbering media, so slow!

But wait …

The Guardian prints (at around 33.4mph) newspapers every single day (well except Sunday, kinda). Not only that but it updates with various editions, or patches if you will. I’ve listened to conversations about last minute changes taking place because a new picture comes in, or a source of a quote needs to be checked. Layouts get swapped in at the last moment and so on.

To me that seems pretty fast, it certainly feels fast. It’s somewhat not unlike Continuous Deployment; you make it, update it, push it out there and fix bugs/corrections as you need to. If anything the paper version is in some ways just a snapshot of the current state of news. Also I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone roll back a newspaper. Sometimes The Graudian makes mistakes, bugs get in there but there are community feedback mechanisms in place for that too.

There are other similarities between Flickr and The G, but I’ll save those for another post. For the moment I now know what the answer is to the “what are you doing at The Guardian?” …

… It’s to do it again, in a heartbeat, and the only thing I’d change would be to try to do it harder and louder and faster than we already did.

The every-so lovely NewspaperClub have just announced their prices for printing your very own paper. And this shouldn’t have to be said, but I will …

Printing your own Newspaper is very exciting.

People are already used to printing books and to an extent magazines, (Blurb, lulu and MagCloud as examples) but newspaper up to this point have been far trickier. Unless you wanted a run of a thousand or so; Newspaper presses are huge and fast (and print lots), digital ones still expensive and not that common.

And that’s what makes it a thrill when your newspapers arrive on the doorstep, like this …

Stuff I learnt

I was very lucky to be able to have a go at printing a Newspaper (again), so I took the opportunity to use various photos to try different things out. High contrast, stripes, gradients, solid blacks an so on, here’s an example double spread …

1. Blacks will have that Newspaper look to them, not solid black, there’ll be specks of white and grey in there, but not as bad as you may think if you were tempted to ask the question “How’s the black appear?” I didn’t notice any weak stripes though the printing, or other stuff you maybe worried about.
2. I used a couple of photos with subtle gradients in and didn’t expect them to come out as well as they did, basically if you have mid grays don’t worry about it too much, the print handles it well.
3. When you convert colour images to black and white punch the contrast up a bit.
4. Best advice came from Tom at NewspaperClub, blow the highlights out a bit (in a way you wouldn’t normally do). Because the paper isn’t white, your whites won’t be, well white. Everything from a very light grey to white will essentially look the same. So adjust your levels so there’s more white at the top-end i.e. drag your right hand marker down about 5-8%, if that makes sense (if it doesn’t don’t worry about it)

The only other thing I discovered was with the center spread …

When I designed the pages, each page had a margin around the edge. My settings …

Page size; 11.378 by 14.9606 inches, no bleed.
Margins; Top: 0.8661, Bottom: 0.9449, Inside: 0.5118, Outside: 0.6299, Gutter: 0.1667 (inches).

… which aren’t definitive or “The Correct” ones, just what I happened to used.

But because of the margins and the preview when I’d uploaded the PDF I assumed the center spread would have a margin down the middle. For that reason I cut out a strip of the center image, so they curves would appear correct, rather like looking out a window with two panes of glass in.

However, in this case the two sides were put flush together, and I didn’t need to cut a strip out of the middle … if you look closely at the picture you can see where the structure doesn’t match up under the dome, that’s totally down to me and not a printing error.

In short

If you’re printing photos, boost the contrast, tweak your levels a bit to give your top end more white, but don’t sweat it too much.

Have fun.

Ebb and Flow of Melbourne Trains by Flink Labs Originally uploaded by flinklabs

Because I was going to post about my new job, but got tired and found this instead.

“Inspired by several visualisations showing GPS tracks of planes, taxis, and people, we have produced a visualisation showing the ebb and flow of the trains in Melbourne over a weekday.

We geocoded all the train lines and converted the published train timetables from pdf for rendering using processing.

You can see an increase in trains during peak hours and a general steady state of trains during the day.

This visualisation was created and produced by Flink Labs www.flinklabs.com