GIS
- PostGIS in Action in Print, Reviewed
- I’ve been hearing about PostGIS in Action for a couple of years now, so I’m surprised that it only came out (in print form, at least) last month. Richard Marsden reviews it on Geoweb Guru: “This is the first…
- Landsat Data Available through ArcGIS Online
- Esri reports that Landsat data dating back to 1972 is now available through ArcGIS Online….
- Chicago Tribune’s News Apps Blog: Making Maps Step-by-Step
- Via GIS Lounge, a five-part series from the Chicago Tribune’s News Apps Blog about “making choropleth maps using PostGIS, TileMill, Mapnik and Google Maps” — the end result being this population map of Illinois. Start with part one, here (fortunately,…
- Two More GIS Books
- Two more GIS books to mention: Web GIS: Principles and Applications by Pinde Fu and Jiulin Sun, from Esri Press (via Esri Mapping Center); and Spatial Analysis and Modeling in Geographical Transformation Process, edited by Y. Murayama and Rajesh Bahadur…
- A GIS Book Roundup
- Adena Schutzberg reviews Muki Huklay’s Interacting with Geospatial Technologies. Despite quibbles about the graphics and the copyediting, Adena says, “This is a solid book that pulls together the research in what hopefully will be a growing area of study…
- The Globe and Mail on GIS and Productivity
- Today’s Globe and Mail included this article discussing how GIS helps business productivity, with an aside on the challenge of getting good data in Canada (exacerbated by the federal government’s recent decision to drop the long-form census). Via All Points…
- iExtMap for iOS Reviewed
- James Fee reviews iExtMap, a mobile GIS viewer for the iPhone and iPod touch (it’ll work on an iPad, but not natively). iTunes link. Despite some issues, “I think there is a ton to like about iExtMap,” says James. “Out…
- Ottawa Citizen Profiles Tomlinson
- 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…
- Another Look at ArcGIS for iOS
- James Cheshire offers his first impressions of the new ArcGIS iPhone/iPod touch/iPad app. I’m continuing to poke away at it on my iPad, but as I’ve said before, people who know their ArcGIS are better situated to evaluate this…
- NGS Awards Medals to Tomlinson, Dangermond
- Last week, the National Geographic Society honoured two giants of the GIS field — Roger Tomlinson, who practically created GIS in the 1960s while working for the Canadian government, and Jack Dangermond, and ESRI/Esri founder/president/CEO Jack Dangermond — with the…
- ArcGIS for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch
- ESRI’s ArcGIS for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch is now available in the iTunes app store. It’s a free download that, among other things, provides access to ArcGIS Online. I’ve installed it on my iPad and have been…
- PostGIS in Action Reviewed
- Bill Dollins reviews PostGIS in Action by Regina Obe and Leo Hsu (see previous entry). “This book addresses a problem I have run into repeatedly in my consulting work: educating database professionals (DBAs, developers, etc.) on working with spatial…
- Antarctic Geospatial Information Center
- The University of Minnesota’s campus paper, The Minnesota Daily, takes a look at the University’s Antarctic Geospatial Information Center (AGIC), which provides maps and GIS analysis to Antarctic researchers….
- What Happened to Neogeography?
- Sean Connin asks what happened to neogeography, a concept that seemed all the rage not so long ago; his answer: that “neogeography” — i.e., web-based mapping tools — has gotten confused and conflated with GIS, which used to be neogeography’s…
- Haitian Earthquake: Links for January 15
- SERVIR produces maps and data for Central America and the Caribbean, including maps for disaster support. Maps of the Haitian earthquake produced to date include damage assessments from satellite imagery, including damage to Port-au-Prince’s seaport, and a map showing…
- A Gentle Introduction to GIS
- A Gentle Introduction to GIS (114-page PDF; online supplements here) is a beginner’s guide that uses the open-source Quantum GIS for its examples; the project was sponsored by the government of Eastern Cape, South Africa. Via GIS Lounge and Slashgeo….
- Exploring Ways of Using SRTM Data
- The Integrity Logic blog looks at some of the things that can be done with elevation data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM); it gets particularly interesting when the SRTM data picks up artificial structures like skyscrapers and landfills….
- Essential Skills for a GIS Career
- Michalis Avraam has compiled a list of the essential skills for a successful GIS career, based on a discussion at a GIS Day event in Seattle. Via Slashgeo….
- Peter Batty on Free Geodata, the Ordnance Survey and the USGS
- The grass is always greener on the other side, Peter Batty argues in this rather funny “georant” at last week’s AGI GeoCommunity 09 in which he defends the Ordnance Survey, sort of, by pointing out that there are significant…
- State Online Atlases
- Western Illinois University librarian Linda Zellmer has compiled a list of state online atlases of various sorts, from online GIS to Google Maps mashups, and from general atlases to those limited to specific topics. Via MAPS-L….
- More Book Reviews
- More reviews of books previously mentioned here: Directions reviews GIS Cartography: A Guide to Effective Map Design (see previous entry). The New York Times reviews The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet, a copy of which I now have and…
- GIS Cartography Reviewed
- James reviews Gretchen N. Peterson’s GIS Cartography: A Guide to Effective Map Design, which, he notes, is written independent of any particular software package. “Gretchen’s book is something that you can use almost anywhere with any medium and won’t…
- GIS Web Maps to Critique Web Mapping Applications
- It looks like GIS Web Maps will be a blog that critiques GIS web mapping: “I usually don’t have that much to say. But I know good when I see it. I know bad when I see it. I usually…
- A Book Roundup
- Briefly noted: Mike Parker’s Map Addict (see previous entry) is reviewed on the Collins Maps blog. GIS Pathway reviews Gretchen N. Peterson’s GIS Cartography: A Guide to Effective Map Design. James Fee notes the upcoming publication of PostGIS in Action…
- ‘GIS Alley’: Fort Collins, Colorado
- Truth be told, I’d never heard of the name “GIS Alley” before today, but it refers to the large group of geospatial companies located in and around Fort Collins, Colorado. Here’s a puff piece in the Fort Collins Coloradoan by…
- Free Mac GIS Software
- The Mac isn’t exactly known as the most GIS-friendly platform out there, but Leszek has compiled a list of free, Mac-compatible GIS applications (most of them are cross-platform rather than Mac-only)….
- April Foolery
- Apart from some rather obscure industry in-jokes and an atrocious pun, the focus of this year’s geospatial-industry silliness seems to be Google Street View and its impact on privacy. Google Earth Blog announces that the next-generation Street View will include…
- Field Guide to Humanitarian Mapping
- The need for accurate and up-to-date maps during a natural disaster or other humanitarian crisis is obvious. Teaching humanitarian aid workers how to make use of maps and mapping software is the idea behind the Field Guide to Humanitarian…
- GIS Book Roundup
- Briefly noted: Geoweb Guru reviews Scott Davis’s GIS for Web Developers; on Vector One, Jeff shares his notes on three recent books from ESRI Press (Building a GIS by Dave Peters, the second edition of Getting to Know ArcGIS Desktop,…
- Silverlight: ArcGIS API, Virtual Earth Map Control, WorldWide Telescope
- A flurry of announcements last week related to Silverlight, Microsoft’s rich media browser plugin. Some will be of interest largely to geospatial professionals or web developers, like the public beta of the ArcGIS API for Silverlight or the Virtual Earth…
- GIS for Dummies
- GIS for Dummies is now out (see previous entry); Leszek has some information about the author, Michael DeMers, an associate professor of geography at NMSU and the author of several other books on GIS, including the textbook Fundamentals of…
- Map Use: Reading and Analysis
- ESRI Press has just published the sixth edition of Map Use: Reading and Analysis, which it acquired from its previous publisher. From the press release: “Replete with nearly 500 maps, photographs, tables, and charts to illustrate the text, this…
- Geospatial Science at RMIT
- The Age has a brief piece on the geospatial science program at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology — “apparently the only dedicated cartography degree in Victoria and one of only two in Australia.”…
- A Brief Book Roundup
- Briefly noted: GeoWeb Guru has a review of Geography Mark-Up Language: Foundation for the Geo-Web by Ron Lake et al. (via Slashgeo); Google Earth Blog reviews Josie Wernecke’s KML Handbook (previously); Vector One reports on the first A-level GIS…
- ‘Data for Decision’: GIS on Punchcards
- “Data for Decision” is a 1967 National Film Board of Canada film that explains the work of the Canada Geographic Information System — one of the earliest GISes in history, if not the earliest — in analysing the huge…
- Making Maps with Unfit Data
- Charlie Frye has an interesting post up on the ESRI Mapping Center blog about the challenge of having to make a map with “unfit” data. “Unfit data will never work to make a good map. It’s a fact,” he writes….
- MAPublisher 8.0
- Version 8.0 of MAPublisher, the suite of cartographic plug-ins for Adobe Illustrator, was released Monday. Costs US$1,249; upgrades as low as US$549. Via MacNN. Previously: MAPublisher 7.0; MAPublisher 6.0….
- Cartographica: GIS for the Mac
- Ogle Earth points to the preview release of Cartographica, a GIS application for the Mac. You’ll have to make do with Stefan’s first impressions; I’m even less of a GIS pro than he says he is, and have no…
- Map Blog Update
- Understanding Google Maps & Yahoo Local Search is self-explanatory. Renalid is dead; Renaud Euvrard is now collaborating with Audrey Malherbe at their new blog, GeoInWeb (en français, bien sûr). GIS Pathway is a site — it has an RSS…
- Historians and GIS
- A debate on the question of what GIS can offer world history, based on this article by J. B. Owens (PDF), triggered a lengthy discussion on MapHist earlier this month. Unfortunately, the MapHist discussion was sidetracked by a throwaway comment…
- Missoula’s Office of Planning and Grants
- Another profile of the GIS going on in a city planning office, this time from the Missoulian, which looks at the City and County of Missoula’s combined Office of Planning and Grants and its senior GIS specialist and mapmaker, Casey…
- Mapping Hurricane Gustav
- Hurricane Gustav Tracking Maps Firstcoastnews.com FLHurricane.com IbisEye MIBAZAAR MSNBC StormAdvisory (click on Gustav) Wundermap Some are better than others; IbisEye, MSNBC and Wundermap are standouts. Via Anything Geospatial, Google Maps Mania, Kottke and La Cartoteca. Hurricane Gustav in Google Earth…
- New York Ocean and Great Lakes Atlas
- The New York Ocean and Great Lakes Atlas, an online atlas of the state’s water resources, was announced yesterday. From the press release: “Currently, more than 200 data sets that contain information on such resources as storm drains, wetland boundaries,…
- B.C. Geodata Available Online, Through Google Earth
- As reported last year, the provincial government of British Columbia is making its geographic databases available online and via Google Earth. The announcement was made last Friday; the Vancouver Sun has coverage. Via, and more at, AnyGeo….
- Two Upcoming GIS Books
- James is looking forward to two upcoming books on GIS from ESRI Press: Building a GIS (Amazon) and The Business Benefits of GIS: An ROI Approach (Amazon, web site)….
- Three Blogs
- Google Earth Design has been around for more than a year, but I’ve apparently missed it until now; the subject of good map design within Google Earth seems a laudable one. Ryan Strynatka writes about his blog, The Fiducial…
- Link Roundup: Early July Edition
- Off camping for a few days; here are a few links to tide you over: Roger Hart’s very good blog, GeoCarta, has moved to a new address and a new platform. The Sandusky Library Archives Research Center’s map collection is…
- GIS Books
- La Cartoteca points to two GIS manuals from the Pragmatic Programmers: Scott Davis’s GIS for Web Developers: Adding “Where” to your Web Applications, which came out last October; and the forthcoming (an online beta is available) Desktop GIS: Mapping the…
- Introductions to GIS and GPS
- GIS: An Overview is a very basic introduction, but it seems to me that that sort of thing is necessary. Via About.com Geography. PC World’s How to Buy a GPS Device is slanted very heavily towards car-mounted GPS navigation systems,…
- Designed Maps
- The ESRI Mapping Center blog reports on a new book from ESRI Press: Designed Maps: A Sourcebook for GIS Users. It’s by Cynthia Brewer, who also wrote Designing Better Maps: A Guide for GIS Users (see previous entry). The…
- Cadastral GIS Horror Stories
- On the Surveying, Mapping and GIS blog, Dave Smith recounts some GIS horror stories involving cadastral data errors — and the ludicrous things that are done to resolve them. “If you have discrepancies, data gaps, quality issues, other issues, I…
- Ed the Map Maker
- This is an article celebrating 40 years of service by Ed Maslonka, the cartographer of Grand Island, Nebraska, but it also offers a taste of what goes on, mapping-wise, in municipal planning departments….
- Turners Falls High School and the U.S. Community Atlas
- The Springfield Republican reports on a GIS project conducted by students of Turners Falls High School, which is part of ESRI’s U.S. Community Atlas program. The students produced a number of maps of the towns of Gill, Montague and…
- Why Paper Maps Are Still Produced
- Vector One asks why so many paper map products are still produced: Paper maps are still produced for a number of reasons. The primary reason that this is the case is due to the fact that paper maps are associated…
- Roger Tomlinson: The Father of GIS
- Today’s Globe and Mail has a profile of Roger Tomlinson, whose work with the Canadian government in the 1960s to develop the first national computerized GIS system has apparently earned him the title of “the father of GIS.”…
- A Map Blog Update: GeoWeb, Cartographismes and More
- The GeoWeb 2007 conference, which takes place later this month and deals with “the convergence of Web technologies, XML, Web services, and GIS,” has a conference blog. The blog associated with Krygier and Wood’s excellent book, Making Maps (reviewed here),…
- GIS and Geography at Dartmouth
- Alumni magazine Dartmouth Life has an article about geography and GIS at Dartmouth College, which “remains the only college in the Ivy League with a distinct geography department.”…
- GeoThought by Peter Batty
- Former Intergraph CTO Peter Batty now has a blog: GeoThought. Via All Points Blog and Anything Geospatial….
- GeoGratis: Free Canadian Topo Data
- Further to the previous report that the government of Canada would make digital topographic data available for free: here is the official announcement and here is the site where you can download that data. It’s called GeoGratis — cute. Via…
- Two Geospatial Industry Blogs
- Two new blogs from the geospatial industry: ESRI Support Center News (via James, who notes that it “seems to be in a holding pattern”); and MapInfo’s Location Intelligence Blog (via All Points Blog)….
- Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica
- The Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica “combines nearly 1100 hand-selected Landsat satellite scenes that are being digitally woven together to create a single, seamless, cloud-free image of the Antarctic continent — the most detailed color representation of this vast…
- The Future of GIS
- Catholicgauze stirs the pot with an essay on the future of GIS and its increasing separation from Geography. Key graf: With [Geographic Information Science] focusing only on GIS the whole reason GIS exists, to study spatial phenomenon, is kicked out…
- GIS and Map Libraries
- Geography Matters, the ESRI blog, has a post up on GIS and map libraries: “While not all institutions manage holdings of this size [the Library of Congress’s map collection], libraries and museums are realizing that a GIS can not only…
- International Polar Year Maps
- The Canadian International Polar Year Internet Map Server maps the research stations, projects and other information associated with the the International Polar Year. The map interface takes a bit of time to load; the data are available as separate…
- Two More Blogs
- Stefan has discovered two brand-spanking-new blogs that have started up this very month: the Google Earth Hacks blog accompanies the site of the same name; MapWrapper.com is a GIS blog with an interest in earth sciences and remote sensing. Previously:…
- ArcGIS Explorer Reviewed
- I’ve been following the news about ArcGIS Explorer, ESRI’s putative response to virtual globe software like Google Earth, since it was first announced (James Fee, for example, has blogged about it a lot), but I haven’t blogged about it…
- Ed Parsons Leaves Ordnance Survey
- First Chandu, now this: Ed Parsons is leaving the Ordnance Survey; he’s been their chief technology officer for more than five years….
- A to Z GIS Reviewed
- GIS Monitor reviews a new book from ESRI Press, A to Z GIS: An Illustrated Dictionary of Geographic Information Systems. “With short, clear, and authoritative definitions of more than 1,800 terms written by more than 150 subject-matter experts, this…
- U.S. Forest Service Geodata
- GPS Tracklog has discovered a clearing house for U.S. Forest Service geodata, and talks about how that geodata can be used (hint: raster images can be viewed in most image viewers)….
- Conservation GeoPortal
- The Conservation GeoPortal is an index of conservation maps and GIS datasets. No maps or data is available on the site itself, just searchable metadata; it points to stuff elsewhere online. More here. Via Maps-L….
- Free GIS Data GeoBlog
- Free GIS Data GeoBlog points to GIS data available for free online; it’s another project by Glenn Letham, whom we’ve heard of before: he’s also behind Anything Geospatial and GISUser.com, among other things. Via Cartography and GPS Tracklog….
- QGIS
- QGIS, an open-source, multiplatform GIS application, has a blog by its developers. Via James Fee, who’s been covering QGIS for a while….
- Forthcoming Books
- Two forthcoming books on the horizon: A to Z GIS: An Illustrated Dictionary of Geographic Information Systems (Amazon), a terminology guide from ESRI Press (press release); and Google Earth for Dummies, which is self-explanatory (via Google Earth Blog)….
- GIS on OS X
- Peter Rukavina explores GIS applications for Mac OS X: “The last time I went looking for a desktop GIS application for my Mac all I found was the beast of a system that is GRASS. … Suddenly it seems that…
- Canada and Open Source GIS
- In a Directions article, Kevin Flanders argues that Canada’s disproportionately large contribution to open source GIS projects is a result of federal government funding, which he contrasts with U.S. government contracts to proprietary GIS vendors….
- ESRI Blog: Geography Matters
- Via James and Glenn, I discover ESRI’s new public (and possibly collaborative) blog about the GIS industry, Geography Matters. Still in its early stages; ought to be interesting to see how it develops….
- Forbes Profiles ESRI
- For people in the geospatial industry, ESRI is omnipresent; for people outside the industry, ESRI is scarcely on our radar, despite their dominance of the GIS software market. For those of us in the latter category, this Forbes article, profiling…
- e_Perimetron
- e_Perimetron is a new quarterly web journal, the focus of which is the application of geospatial technologies to old maps. The first issue, for example, has articles that transform old maps to conform to known coordinates, assign projections to portolans,…
- GIS Portal for McAllen, Texas
- The city of McAllen, Texas has launched a GIS portal, The Monitor reports….
- Lists
- On Here Be Dragons, a list of resources for making custom maps for Garmin GPS receivers. On Very Spatial (via), a list of desktop GIS applications….
- Mark Monmonier
- Directions reports that the keynote speaker at this week’s NEGIS conference was professor and author Mark Monmonier, which led me to his web site. Coincidentally, a copy of his classic book, How to Lie with Maps, arrived from Amazon this…
- Think Globally, Act Regionally: GIS for the Social Sciences
- Think Globally, Act Locally: GIS and Data Visualization for Social Science and Public Policy Research, is a new textbook from ESRI Press. Authored by San Francisco State University urban studies professor Richard LeGates, the book is part of a project…
- GIS Internet Resources
- Via Ogle Earth, a collection of online GIS resources on the web site of the U.S. Army’s Topographic Engineering Center….
- Book Review: Making Maps by Krygier and Wood
- Making Maps: A Visual Guide to Map Design for GIS by John Krygier and Denis Wood Guilford Press, 2005. Softcover, 303 pp. ISBN 1-59385-200-2 I love this book. It’s just so neat. Although Making Maps is aimed at a GIS…
- Triangulations: March 27
- Jeff Thurston’s contribution to the debate over free geodata looks at the question of scale: if you want geospatial data to be free and updated regularly, consider the huge amount of territory that has to be mapped. Wired’s piece,…
- B.C. Base Mapping
- Here’s an article from itbusiness.ca about British Columbia’s Base Mapping and Geomatic Services branch, a part of the provincial government’s Integrated Land Management Bureau. The article covers some of the applications of the branch’s data at a fairly general level….
- Triangulations: March 20
- An article about GPS and geocaching in South Africa points out the extreme markup for GPS devices in that country: they cost twice as much as they do in the U.S.. The proposed INSPIRE directive, which would ostensibly standardize…
- Link Roundup for February 17
- I’m still up to my neck in Olympics nonsense, but I’ve got a few links to share with you that have been accumulating in my “post these soon” file. For all you tube map fanatics, a London Underground Map where…
- Link Roundup for February 7
- Significant Blogspot outages rendered several favourite mapping blogs unavailable for portions of last weekend, including Cartography and GeoCarta. The city of North Platte, Nebraska, its police department, and surrounding Lincoln County all use different GIS and CAD software to generate…
- AHA: GIS and History
- At last weekend’s meeting of the American Historical Association, there was a session on GIS and History, the papers presented at which are available as PDF files (on the page, click on the name of the presenter). Historians regularly import…
- A Roundup: Society, Journal, Blog, Podcast
- A few quick links for the Map Site Directory: Via MapHist, I’ve learned about the British Cartographic Society and its journal, The Cartographic Journal. ArcDeveloper is a new blog that should be of interest to ESRI GIS developers. Via Spatially…
- Free Australian Maps, Images and Data
- The Australian government makes satellite imagery, geology maps (1:250,000 scale) and spatial data available free of charge. Via Glenn’s GISUser Weblog. See previous entry: Satellite Images and the Weather….
- VanMap: Vancouver Map System
- VanMap is a GIS viewer for the city of Vancouver, British Columbia; it’s got a surprising number of layers, more of which were added last September. (Use “VanMapLite” if you’re having browser difficulties with the main interface.) Via Vector One,…
- Designing Better Maps Reviewed
- GIS Monitor reviews Cynthia Brewer’s Designing Better Maps: “Brewer’s advice is authoritative, practical, and useful to novice and experienced mapmakers alike. She focuses on just a few key questions — how to design a map so that its layout…
- SlashGISRS
- SlashGISRS is a Slashdot-style community focusing on GIS and remote sensing. Looks very promising. (And it’s run by a Canadian non-profit organization: there are no limits to my country’s geographic conspiracy.)…
- Open Source GIS Guide
- GIS Unshackled: A Guide to Open-Source Tools: a look at some of the open-source software packages, from databases to scalable vector graphics, that can be used in lieu of established commercial software. Via Very Spatial….
- Katrina Maps and Photos: Behind the Scenes
- Tyler Mitchell talks about the behind-the-scenes work to process approximately 1,500 NOAA images from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and upload them to the Katrina Image Warehouse, using open-source software; the basics were up and running within 48 hours. Via…
- Map Events in Colorado
- Denver is going to be a busy place for map lovers this month. The International Map Collectors’ Society’s symposium takes place between September 18 and 23, and is held in conjunction with the Rocky Mountain Map Society’s antique map fair,…
- Ten More Mapping Blogs
- I posted links to a lot of new blogs next month, but Cartography’s roundup of cartography and related blogs last week brought a grand total of seven more blogs to my attention. Plus, I was already aware of Ed Parsons’s…
- Spatially Adjusted
- Another blog to tell you about, and I can’t believe I missed reporting this one earlier: Spatially Adjusted, a GIS blog by James Fee, with a lot of stuff on ESRI and other software….
- Preservation and Accessibility
- According to this article, the USGS’s shift from paper to digital maps is generating all sorts of potential problems. Some of them are typically bureaucratic: figuring out which agency is responsible for archiving and preserving which data (and paying for…
- Question: Best GIS PHP Module?
- Marco Fioretti is looking for GIS PHP modules. He writes, “I have an urgent project to work on which includes processing GIS data with PHP, and I’d really like to start with something which is already tested.” My original post…
- Using MapServer with Chameleon
- Speaking of Tyler Mitchell, he’s got an article on Directions explaining Chameleon, a collection of PHP scripts that, he says, allows non-programmers to build web mapping applications using MapServer through its MapScript API….
- Open Source Geospatial Tools; Web Mapping Illustrated
- I’m overdue in posting this one, which comes to us thanks to James. Tyler Mitchell, whose Web Mapping Illustrated, a guide to free mapping software, is now shipping, had an article up on O’Reilly last month that I think serves…
- Whither GIS?
- A Directions magazine editorial, An Open Letter to GIS/Geospatial Software Companies, argues that between data providers providing mapping data to companies like Google, who then build hackable web tools, that are then used by GPS users to build custom maps…
- The History of GIS
- “Yet his search for the dark, hidden ancestors of modern mapmaking illustrates something simple and true: maps — like technological progress itself — are not inherently benevolent.” The history of GIS is controversial: some argue it emerged from the military…
- Social Mapping and the Cartographic Modeling Lab
- If you’re interested in social mapping (see previous entry), you shouldn’t miss this AP wire story about the work done by the University of Pennsylvania’s Cartographic Modeling Lab. The focus of the story is their work to correlate childhood obesity…
- Journal of Maps: No Ordnance Survey Data
- Another unfortunate result of the Ordnance Survey’s copyright on its mapping data: the Journal of Maps announced last week that, because of the Ordnance Survey’s restrictive licencing, “we are currently unable to accept any maps based upon OS data.” (See…
- More on Open Geodata and the Ordnance Survey
- Mapping Hacks has a report on the Forum on Open Geodata that took place earlier this month (see previous entry), where the argument was put forth that the Ordnance Survey should open up its data for the economic spinoff benefits…
- The Big and the Little
- Yesterday’s Guardian had a piece exploring the dichotomy between ground-level, do-it-yourself, open-source mapping projects done by people walking about with GPS units, and the massive geodata owned by government agencies. So why would anyone want to make their own map,…
- Forum on Open Geodata
- More on the attempt to produce GIS data for the UK independent of Crown copyright (see previous entry: there will be a Forum on Open Geodata on April 14 in London; see the link for speakers and details. From the…
- OpenOSX GrassPro
- GRASS, the open-source GIS software, has been available for Mac OS X before; on Friday, OpenOSX announced GrassPro, which, in addition to GRASS 6.0.0, adds several related utilities. Panther and X11 required….
- Boston GIS Office and Atlas
- The Boston Phoenix has an interview with the manager of the Boston Redevelopment Authority’s Office of Digital Cartography and GIS, Carolyn Bennett; the discussion ranges from GIS in general, to the nature of the Office’s work, to one of their…
- Journal of Maps
- Richard writes to draw our attention to a new online scholarly journal, the Journal of Maps, which launched last year and had their first issue this month. From their about page: The Journal of Maps is a new inter-disciplinary online,…
- OpenStreetMap
- OpenStreetMap “is an effort to produce free (CC-licensed) streetmaps of the world.” It’s in “pre-pre-pre alpha” at the moment. The idea is to get free data by running around with a GPS, analysis of aerial photography or other methods since…
- London Free Map
- The University of Openness (previous entry) has a new project to make copyright-free street maps of London; the page explains the details and MO, but it looks like it’ll involve an awful lot of GPS tracing and GIS data processing…
- Getting Out the Vote with GIS
- Wired has a story about how GIS is being used to increase voter turnout. Now, get-out-the-vote organizers have started overlaying information from registered voter lists, attaching data such as voter history, party registration or time in the community to every…
- Ordnance Survey Invents Toids, Reticulates Splines
- The Ordnance Survey is developing a new mapping system that will have a profound impact on everything from insurance rates to trip planning. The key? Something called a toid, says the Grauniad: The word toid does not yet appear in…
- MAPublisher 6.0
- MAPublisher 6.0 was announced today. It’s a collection of Adobe Illustrator plug-ins that allow you to import GIS data into that software. Manipulating proper data with a proper graphics program, apparently. (via MacCentral)…
- Generating GIS with PHP
- Image_GIS is a PHP package that allows you to generate on-the-fly maps in PNG or JPEG image formats from geographical datasets. Don’t worry if you don’t know what this means: essentially it means you can transform raw GIS data into…
- Fighting Crime with GIS
- “[D]atabases of all types of crime, plotted on detailed local maps, have become a powerful new crime-fighting tool,” says a BBC report on the use of mapping technology by police in Britain. One example given: tracking arson by teens in…
- Community Mapping Assistance Project
- Non-profit community groups do not have the same research resources that governments and corporate entities do. As far as mapping and GIS data is concerned, the New York Public Interest Research Group is trying to change that with its Community…
- Geospatial Data
- North American geospatial data is available free from a couple of government sites. For the U.S., there’s the USGS GEO-DATA Explorer (via MetaFilter), and, for Canada, there’s GeoGratis….
