ANDREW ZOLNAI BLOG

A tale of two cities: web maps new and old

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai) — Sun, 19 May 2013 18:05:00 +0000

Last I posted on vector online GIS, and that appears to be gaining traction. Mapbox offers through TileMill and OpenStreetMaps editing. These are new an emerging technologies that are exciting, and it contrasts with Esri who offers a slew of tools on the desktop and in arcgis.com. WMS is for example still immature on giscloud.com (though it is OGC compliant now), as are the symbology and labels. They do not offer model builder like Esri or Qgis (thru Sextante). But they do offer a service to process GIS functions online and allow to load data direct from web source, avoiding costly down- & up-loads. Here I compare how I used a 180K vector dataset from NOAA NGDC described previously.

This is very much a work in progress, stay tuned for Arcgis Online for example. Also Google Fusion Tables I used elsewhere are not appropriate in this context. And of course there are many many more platforms bird-dogged for example by the blog roll below to the right. Here is, however, what GSHHG maps looks like in giscloud.com and ArcGIS for Home Use that offer modest barriers to entry:

giscloud.com online
screenshot in ArcGIS desktop
rendered as WMS in arcgis.com

click image to go to arcgis.com

View Larger Map

Vectors are your friend, Part II

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai) — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 17:48:00 +0000

Following on my previous post about giscloud.com posting vector maps directly on-line in HTML5, I loaded NOAA's GSHHG - A Global Self-consistent, Hierarchical, High-resolution Geography Database in its entirety. You must be crazy, you say, to load a 425 Mb dataset on line! But here is the workflow:

go to the website and read the description - cool! world vector data sets for free in a self-consistent format and at multiple scales - but wait! do NOT download 158Mb zipped file
created an account and a project for free on giscloud.com - note they have a freemium model, that is free for personal use, then charges monthly for commercial use
create a map and go to File Manager > Web to Cloud upload - do NOT download then upload even zipped shape files! - GSHHG 425Mb unzipped transferred in 3 min that's 2.5Mb/s
if you want to further increase performance or perform GIS functions, then load them into PostGIS on giscloud.com an access 253,635 (that's 247K) vectors lightning fast
in fact it's so fast you no longer need the hierarchy - 'f' the most detailed level at 278Mb will show in full detail the Aland Islands, S Baltic Sea famous for its numerousness

I wrote in 2004 that "accuracy and speed no longer need to be trade-offs against one another according to available computer performance", and in 1992 that "worldwide databases are available and the right database engine will show interactive coastline features down to 30 meter resolution".

Well guess what? This data set plus on-line vehicle just got us there!

There are of course many worldwide datasets, such as the ESRI basemaos, the NACIS Natural Earth free world maps at varying scales too, as well as the arcgis.com datasets such as on this blog's banner map and many other on RT Wilson's site. But there are many innovations here:

online vector maps merge speed and accuracy
freemium business model to enable online access
web-to-web data transfers that save on ISP bills

If you zoom out on the map above, you will also see the USGS world plate and volcano data: plate boundaries are color-coded that is standard, but and volcanoes are clustered for more visually arresting display.

"You can have it all
... Nothing too big or small
... What you get is exactly what you give
... What you give is exactly what you receive
... You can have it all"

RSPB2013 bird counts mapped

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai) — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 08:53:00 +0000

Releasing data really works, Part III

RSPB 2013 Big Garden Bird Watch released data by county, listing bird counts for each county in order of abundance. Why not then transpose these into one row of bird types (73) per recorded county (96, excl. N Ireland):

Take then the OS Opendata Boundary Line polygon shape files, and conflate the legal entities into a simple county polygons where counties existed, augmented with district and metro polygons where they didn't (totaling 112, excl. N Ireland too):

And then post the cleaned up OS Counties and RSPB 2013 data on the ShareGeo site as simple shape files, and the same county and bird count data on the ArcGIS Online as layer packages. Finally publish it on this private GIS cloud:

As a bonus the shape files computed areas, allowing to post relative bird counts by area that are more relevant that bulk counts. Go ahead and download these to your favorite package... and see the fascinating riches of the RSPB 2013 survey! And why not check out the Red and Amber listed birds, under List in GoogleDocs and p.2 in SlideShare above, as well as the original data links?

The release of public data gives such an opportunity to discover and explore the bird population trends in England, and to promote education on issues that are underpinned by such surveys. Follow the RSPB and Ordnance Survey, who have been sent this information. Stay tuned.

Maps are forever (Part II)

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai) — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 14:11:00 +0000

I wrote earlier about a 1610 map from the Harvard University Library of the Cambridge UK region, a snapshot of which I simply edited the tear and restored it by eye-balling it in Photoshop Elements. I detailed before some local history and geology too.

click on image to enlarge, then 'back' on your browser to return here

When you compare it to the local Open Street Map (the on-line map with the most detail) you will see the differences in the distribution of settlements, roads and rivers.

click on image to enlarge, then 'back' on your browser to return here

I tabulated the differences in localities and rivers below - the left hand column indicates where in the map the features are to be found:

Note how towns important just over 400 years ago are either no longer important (Reach), no longer there (Chester, Fledishe, Raddesley, Stane) or just coming back from nowhere (Northstowe). Also ten lesser towns aren't there... and Cambridge ranks with Reach, but Chester (Castle Hill?) ranks higher! Roman past is not only evident in the long straight roads (not shown here) but also in old ports (Reach along the old marsh shoreline) and fortifications (Chester). The rivers are called flu (as in fluvial) and bridges (causey) are marked, signifying their importance (and rarity) in this waterlogged area. Contrast also the rarity of roads (dotted lines) and preponderance of rivers in he 1610 map prior to the drainage of the Fens.

Last but not least, note the exquisite hand-drawing of buildings as another measure of locales' importance. These maps were often water colour and hand painted, hence their fragility and poor state as I repatched it in a manner of speaking. At the Geological Survey of Canada I once worked on old geological maps that were cut in squares, backed on linen for folding and transportation, but they were had painted in water colour too...

Mapping languages on the internet

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai) — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 21:16:00 +0000

Let's explore global language distribution from World Mapper, then language usage on the internet as seen from Wikipedia. This was inspired by an article in The Economist as well as data I previously collected an posted on Google Drive to explore various topics on Google Fusion Tables.

Let's first take the map of world languages that posts the fabulous variety of languages - hover the mouse over to see the number of languages spoken by country (DR Congo and Ivory Coast don't map as various databases call those differently like spelling out Democratic Republic or French Côte d'Ivoire):

Then let's look at Wikipedia's table of languages used to post, edit and visit its crowd sourced information. The Economist says that whilst it's not a comprehensive sample, interesting conclusions can be drawn from the usage statistics.

click on image to enlarge

Now in order to merge these datasets some simplifying assumptions had to be made. Only the most populous language - the 1st in each Worldmapper list entries - was assigned to each country (that is a gross oversimplification of language distribution). Each was then used a a key to merge with Wikipedia article language tables. As that union assigned the full number of articles in each language to each country, I simply divided the article count by the number of countries (that also is a gross oversimplification to assume an even distribution of wiki authorship across countries). See earlier on sports, trade & religion how normalisation greatly reduces the wild variations of raw numbers.

Whilst the total Wikipedia articles are overwhelmingly in English:

The distribution of authoring languages by population tells a different story:

The Economist suggests Wikipedia points to a real resurgence of linguistic awareness and pride by the sheer proportion of articles posted when factored against population... This appears patently true on this map! And please go ahead and visit my Google Fusion Table site to explore it a bit more...

As a final note, consider the unevenness of the language distribution on Wikipedia:

"Free Google" e-Book review

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai) — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 23:36:00 +0000

JM Internet Group published a guide to "Free SEO, Social Media, and AdWords Resources from Google for Small Business Marketing". I am offering it an honest review as a former net'preneur - I use the internet social media round-trip to help along this blog today and oilelefant.com a while back, and shared my experiences on SlideShare. I also create web maps, and without any further technical ado let's say Google were less than forthcoming in providing help with crossing an API upgrade... This echoes author Jason McDonald's (JM) reason to write "Free Google..." in the first place! He set out to render explicit for the rest of us what is implicit to geekdom and help 'free Google' from itself.

As you flip through the pages, the first thing that strikes you is its less than 50 pages length, and the peppering of figures or URLs make the text eminently readable. That is important to break through the digerati barrier - as JM says "if you know the question then you'll find the answer"... but it helps to know where to ask it in the first place!

click to enlarge

The second striking thing is JM calls 'a spade a spade'. He makes no bones about the fact Search is an advertising medium: have you noticed what we see every time we google anything? Ads are so in-your-face that you might actually miss them! It helps that we are bombarded with them in other media, but JM quickly points out the other not-so-obvious social media truism - that ads are targeted to your searches and thus offer great value-add to Google themselves. While that gets Messrs. Page and Bryn out of bed every morning, JM asks us: why not use ourselves the tools they make so freely available?

So first JM lays out the basic structure of a results page, and the ins&outs of advanced search techniques, as well as that much underused Help. The SEO section starts with Google Local (21st c. Yellow Pages), and Google+ (son-of-Facebook) and YouTube (son-of-a-gun is unique). Adwords and Google Analytics are sufficiently intricate to merit a few more pages and a chapter of their own; but here the text is very prosaic and to the point in helping elucidate how those knotty (to me at least) tools can be used by all of us. The last section is a folksy Googling Googlers in a grab-bag of info and links JM didn't know where else to put but didn't want to leave you without.

Now for the shortcomings: call me a mapping fiend but Google Maps is sufficiently important IMHO that is merited some reference. They're not even the best tool in town, but perhaps they're subsumed in Local such that JM saw no merit in expanding upon - after all we drive cars without a care for how engines work, save the type of fuel and where the fuel cap goes - but as the recent press on map wars between Apple and Google smartphone offerings can only underline their importance. Also the very gripe in my opening that Google Maps migration is difficult - due to its new focus on mobile apps - is also bypassed by JM: After all, where are you likely to use any of your new found knowledge, if not on your smartphone?

So in a nutshell:

good one-stop resource
does what it says on the label
to-the-point and well structured

Railways over a century ago failed to understand that they were not in the business of rolling-stock, but that of moving goods never mind attendant services... We must also understand that this is not about searches but about ads - and it's a double edged sword where we are both the carriers for sure, but also the potential beneficiaries if we use the tips outlined in this e-book in the US and the UK - I cannot recommend it enough to help

click image to enlarge

Local maps one year on from Kuwait

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai) — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 17:49:00 +0000

Hard to believe it's over a year since I left Kuwait, and I'm back in Cambridge now working west of London - the shortest commute yet, weekly as opposed to every 10 weeks in Kuwait or every two weeks in Milan three years ago - so just out of curiosity I looked for web maps of the area again.

Enlarge map

Google and OpenStreetMap left a little to be desired in the geography, but Leaddog's Syria GIS Map is very impressive indeed. Aside from the unfortunate symbology (Cross for Mosque) it's spot on.

Then I turn to my old employ's arcgis.com map of a Kuwait University project I helped with (log in as guest/guest as instructed). It's a full Kuwait Municipality map, with GIS and geodesign of the new university, but also the whole city complete with directions including barriers, which I haven't seen on Google or Bing maps! And when you zoom to Salmiya I lived in for over a year, I found the local coop but not the mosque next door.

click image to enlarge

There is no permalink so you have to go to the site and zoom out to see Salmiya the cape (Ras al Salmiya) to the NW, but it's a full-fledged web GIS with measuring tools and even history for the Kuwait University Project. And the project itself zooms in to trees and room-level detail true to geodesign.

Google Fusion Tables for new Google Maps?

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai) — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 17:09:00 +0000

I posted on my old website a number of Google Maps in v.2 API that I have not converted to v.3. I also used Google Fusion Tables a number of times under the 'old look' - the 'new look' doesn't afford Heat Maps and polygon rendering as yet out-of-the-box - along comes a Google Fusion Tool that helps both on v.3 API and the new régime with very simple Google Fusion Table templates and new rendering.

This is an iframe version of the updated original posted on Facebook, Google+ and twitter for New Years fun. As some of my pages are similar to these templates with its drop-down function, this may be my way forward against the day Google Map v.2 API is turned off. This is important because if my old website looses a few examples, I may now have an answer for templiers.org who posted one of my web maps...

Stay tuned!

"The shots heard around the world"

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai) — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 02:18:00 +0000

Recent mass shootings in the US and elsewhere affect me in a particular way: My parents grew up in Nazi then Soviet occupied Pest, on the east shore of the Danube overlooked by the Buda Castle (dark green below), from which guns fired down streets perpendicular to the river (grey at right below), so residents literally ran the gauntlet across those streets, and friends of my parents lost a babe in arms from a stray bullet; my parents thus emigrated just before my birth to give me a better life, but that included six months in Algiers during a revolution where I too witnessed two fatalities early 1961.

Click on image to go to original

Needless to say I have a certain position on gun control... and it is not the NRA's! So I engaged in some debates on Facebook and elsewhere, signed a whitehouse.gov petition on the topic, and looked for good data on gun usage in relation to homicides and crimes. The Guardian had excellent coverage, not only in statistics but also the attendant data in their outstanding Data Blog. Whilst I created maps in Google Fusion Tables before, look no further for great uses of Google's new rendering tools:

Click on image to go to original

The issue is complicated: if the rate of assault and murder is overwhelmingly tipped toward firearms, their numbers are in slight decrease. I also found that the address locator and sharing functions are simple yet intriguing additional tools.

Click on image to go to original

This map also shows that whilst the US has the most guns per capita, it certainly doesn't have the highest homicide rates globally. Indeed from the same Data Blog in October 2010, the correlation appears to be between world development and crime.

My aim here is to cast a little perspective on a currently intense debate, which needs to be addressed for sure, but with cooler heads let's hope...

Maps are forever...

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai) — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 22:56:00 +0000

... or they are Man's best friend. I'm a big fan of the British Library, not only because it's next to Kings Cross station I alight when coming to London often (or rarely hop onto the Eurostar at nearby St Pancras to Bruxelles or Paris) - bl.uk has an amazing array of old maps, which they just finished georeferencing through a significant effort in crowd-sourcing (the 21st. c. variant of volunteering).

These maps are now linked to Old Maps Online of the Great Britain Historical GIS Project at University of Portsmouth UK. And being an amateur medievalist* myself, I set the time slider atop the page to between 1000 and 1725, and presto! up comes a 1610 map of "Cambridgshire : described with the deuision of the hundreds, the townes situation, with the armes of the colleges of that famous vniuersiti and also the armes of all such princes and noblemen as haue heertofore borne the honorable tytles & dignities of the Earldome of Cambridge [sic]" - isn't this map a beauty?

Click image to enlarge

I explored on-line the villages north of Cambridge - a fascinating area spanning Iron Age forts and dykes, Roman roads and ports, medieval moats and churches, and irrigation ditches and canals that survive to this day throughout the region (refer to HC Darby's books in the link above*) - if you zoom into between Cambridge and Ely, you will notice the parishes in capital letters, the towns and villages with exquisitely detailed symbols, and the rivers and hills in artistic detail, sometimes fanciful (just south off this frame, the Gog Magog Hills rear up like the Rocky Mountains!).

As Napoleon once said, major battles lie always across the edges of two map-sheets. A corollary here is that areas or interest lie along map creases or folds. In addition the map area along the central fold got torn and smudged. So I copied and restored a small portion using Adobe Photoshop Elements, eye-balling the discontinuities to slide and slightly distort the map back into a semblance of continuity.

Click image to enlarge

From top to bottom you can see the Ouse and Cam Flu (as in fluvial on the French fleuve), Denny, Cottenham, Waterbeache, Longsta(nt)on, Mylton, Histon (Imp)ingt(on) and Cambridge across the river. Note how the font size depicts towns that were more important then: Reche (now Reach) had been a Roman port once, and shows far larger than Cambridge even! Also the current new town of No(rt)hsto(w) appears as a capitalised parish name then. And Chester is a name whose Roman origin signifies castle, of which Castle Hill remains in Cambridge. Also the importance of river crossings at that time can be seen as bridges drawn on the map - interestingly Ely, just north off this frame, features a bridge not an island - and the pathways follow river banks, but there is no sign of significant thoroughfares here...

Anyway I could go on and on, I'll let you travel with your fingers or your mouse on this map dating back 402 years c/o Image Delivery Service at Harvard University Library. Enjoy!

Step through Hurricane Sandy the last six days

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai) — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 11:41:00 +0000

NOAA NRT AIRS fly satellites that record cloud cover and other atmospheric sensors described when I tracked Kuwaiti sandstorms. Stepping back six days offers a fascinating glimpse in the progress of the hurricane. Hurry as this posting will quickly become stale-dated as the storm moves off the US East Coast. Here is a presentation built in ArcGIS Online for your viewing pleasure.

View Larger Map

Click on View Larger Map and View Presentation to scroll through. Alternately view the legend and look for AIRS NRT False Color Map (previous x day) to step through it yourself.

Map Stories are your friend

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai) — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 09:51:00 +0000

Simple map stories help scientists make important work a lot more relevant to their audience, by putting their story at the front. The maps and data are there in their completeness, but out of the way as supporting materials. This adds a twist to a growing list of on-line map stories and community maps, and I was motivated by past work with reporters to better cover news.

My simple map of the origin and spread of agriculture in Europe & Middle East raised a comment that spurred me onto creating a map story. I added as a backdrop the UNESCO World Heritage sites for a global context of historic interest. This is a free and easy way to create mash-ups explained previously (click on points below to get more details):

View Larger Map

But why stop at a map when you can have an app? my neo-geo friends would say. Esri makes that easy too, as Owen commented in my previous post. I created one from stock arcgis.com adding the story and legend as side panels:

click image to launch app

ArcGISserver also helped Owen tweak a map story into what linguists anthropologists might look for. The map is still there... but it has been put behind a button!

click image to launch app

Best of all, it works perfectly on smartphones and tablets: The story and the map are sequenced, rather than crowding the screen all at once. Try it... entering bit.ly/PU0135 is easy! Or select it on this blog that reads well on mobile devices too...

Blog readership Sept 2009 - 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai) — Sun, 30 Sep 2012 10:39:00 +0000

Three years into moving to my blog page, here are a few stats on pageviews. Thanks to everyone especially @google, @slashgeo and @cageyjames for helping spread the word.

Cummulative numbers
Top 10 Map
Referrals
And for fun you can see how it all started on this 1 year old slideshow...

Releasing data really works, Part II

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai) — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 11:40:00 +0000

[Oct 2012 update: Here is an example on how much further map stories can be taken]

Here is another simple example of posting data as maps on-line, in order to help linguists this time elucidate spatio-temporal relationships on not-insignificant amounts of data.

In my previous post I suggested that downloading public data, putting it in context and QCing it, then re-posting it to the originators helps cooperate for the greater good of improving said datasets. That exercise started, however, in trying to help Cambridge University archaeologists use one of their peers data on the geo-history of East Anglia.

Geocurrents.org posts linguists' information using beautiful maps to explain complex geo-histrical contexts. A debate emerged around computational geography: on the one hand ethno-lingusitic issues are very complex but based on sparse data as research is far from easy; on the other hand computer modelling has been attempted with mixed success. So I proposed to them that online GIS may just be the way to post complex data and tease out those elusive relationships, to help put scientific fact ahead of popular myth.

To put maps where my mouth is, I took a dataset posted in the first comment to the originating article of the debate. I cleaned it up a bit to only show spatio-temporal data on carbon 14 dates on Eurasian sites, where Neolithic remains help trace hypothetical and potential origin of agriculture. Follow the dark to light tan from roughly 10,000 to 5.000 years BCE:

View Larger Map

I simply went to ArcGIS Online, logged in and create an ArcGIS Explorer map by importing the simplified spreadsheet as a CSV file with type, latitude, longitude, site, region and carbon 14 dating information. I then classified them on a simple colour ramp using natural breaks. Four classes approached the breaks in the Neolithic phases around 6,400 and 8,800 BCE. Quite simple really.

This is a tiny example in a vast topic: it addresses nonetheless the prickly issue of correctly representing complex spatio-temporal relationships by non-GIS experts. The aim is to help avoid misrepresentations of data that fuel unnecessary debates, and thus help focus on important issues.

Releasing public data really works! (updated)

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai) — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 22:05:00 +0000

UK Ordnance Survey released Open Data to the public two and a half years ago. English Parish boundaries have been more or less constant since the Domesday survey in 1087. That allowed me to post Cambridge University HC Darby and Yale University Julie Bowring socio-economic data, by simply adding attribute data to the Ordnance Survey shape files. That onerous, if one-time, task was entirely manual: when Socium launched Online Validation it seemed only natural to try it out; they actually wrote some simple rules and we thus co-branded as quality assured by Socium Online Validation Service wherever I posted the data. Here are the resulting error shape files:

UPDATE: See here as a live map the top two features, which are the validation points:

In the upper right hand margin of this blog, you can find my private cloud location.

The resulting 25 spikes and kickbacks out of 1900 Parish polygons for East Anglia are, at 1.3%, a ratio I might have envied in my digital data capture days (1982 - 92 here). Whilst they didn't affect the integrity of my project - Parishes are used as anchors for attributes by which wealth is measured, rather than as areas or perimeters per se - it seemed only natural to inform the Ordnance Survey creators of said deviations.

While I as a user can find and point to the errors, only the authors can fix it - indeed the Ordnance Survey's copyright notice only allows to copy the data under fair dealing - but returning to the download page I found no feedback mechanism other than a Customer Service email... But wait! They promote their data not only online but also in open events publicised by @plangfordsmith such as this one. I asked there how to feed back this information and a few emails later they check Socium's error polygons and opendata@ordnancesurvey.co.uk reply that these will be incorporated in the next update... rimshot

So that loops the loop:

from @pterhaar unofficial announcement at Where2.0 early 2010 (thanks @stevenfeldman for this) to the actual release that April
through augmenting a portion in East Anglia in my project, that lead to QCing late last year upon Socium's launch and uncovering errors
to returning the error files this month to the Ordnance Survey, and finally the update of said data at the next data release cycle

In other words in a small way here, releasing public data really worked, and thanks everyone for their help - Drs Oosthuizen and Willmoth at Cambridge University, @giscloud and @mapsnrocks for helping with giscloud.com and arcgis.com post this data, data.gov.uk, bgs.gov.uk and sharegeo.ac.uk for posting it, @sociumcloud for online validation and @ordnancesurvey for reaching out.

Mapping Tropical Storm / Hurricane Isaac

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai) — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 22:00:00 +0000

A map slide show last year tracked dust and wind storms in Kuwait. I simply refocused it on the Gulf of Mexico to track the tropical storm Isaac, predicted to gain hurricane strength by land fall in Louisiana. It shows NOAA's cloud cover, wind direction and alert areas detailed here. [Please be patient as this map may take a while to load.]

NOAA AIRS NRT from Andrew's Arcgis.com
View Larger Map

That simple DIY map using one web service was meant to show how easy it is to grab public data. Disaster response maps are of course a lot more sophisticated and show the variety of ways found to mash up the various datasets the public will need to stay apprised of the storm-cum-hurricane. Here are but two examples, of which the twitterverse and blogosphere will soon be replete (you can start with @cageyjames' catalog):

Hurricane Isaac Web Map overview - Esri Disaster Response
View Larger Map

Topical Storm Isaac - Google Crisis Response

On a local historic footnote, my friend George Dailey mused:

Very weird that it might hit the New Orleans area on the 7^th anniversary of Katrina. While not as powerful, it also carries a name associated with the unnamed 1900 hurricane that hit Galveston -- Isaac’s storm.

The politics of London2012 Olympic medal counts

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai) — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 21:23:00 +0000

I was curious about the London2012 Olympic medal count - why rank them by gold medals as BBC did, rather than by total medals as perhaps statistically more significant? It kept TeamGB in #3, ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympic gold medal rank of 4 (rather than ahead of the Russians I'm told). In any case the top two - US and China - stood unchallenged, and every country performed well in what some called the best games ever... even if I hear that at every four years!

Both US and China seek to win our hearts an minds in the sports arena as well as the politcal one. As current and possibly future political and economical top powers, they eclipse Russia and Great Britain, who vied for and held that post the last and the previous century respectively. But do they eclipse other nations when counting medals not in raw numbers - however you rank them - but relative to their population or more accurately to their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita?

The Guardian suggests just that. And my previous posts related how trends in various religions and UNESCO World Heritage sites can be smoothed if not reversed depending on adjustments to population from United Nations and/or GDP per capita from World Bank. Likewise I posted the London2012 medal counts and merged them with GDP per capita for 2010, into a medals table by population (popM) and by GDPperCapita (GPC).

I tweeted colour-coded tables to show how rankings are affected - the chosen ranking in a smooth colour grade, contrasting other rankings by their interrupted colour grade - for these London2012 medal counts by gold or by total, or by popM and GPC. Tables and pictures aside - you got it! - maps are a better way to display the distribution. Yet:

maps convey geographic extent of countries involved:

hence the importance to normalise by population, GDP or area
and to use colour schemes to highlight statistical differences

Google Fusion Tables are the easiest if not the only way to:

manipulate spreadsheets on-line (merge, multiply etc.)
and post them directly by country in simple maps

London2012 Olympic medal count, raw

London2012 Olympic medal count by population (per thousand)

London2012 Olympic medal count by GDPperCapita (*1000)

More simple maps in current affairs

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai) — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 23:19:00 +0000

Geocurrents.info posted an interesting item on UNESCO World Heritage Sites list. I suggested that their otherwise lovely static maps could be augmented via dynamic maps. They're not computer mappers, so I pointed them to Google Fusion Tables as the simplest way to post simple aggregate maps by country. Here is what their maps on World Heritage Site count looks like (note this is still 'beta', as for example Côte d'Ivoire and DR Congo do have sites, and I had to match country names to Google):

Does this raw count however reflect various countries' interest in preserving heritage? Or does this map simply reflect, say, the sheer size of population? I reflected earlier how the distribution of Islam is toned down when factored by population.

Where Fusion Tables get interesting is the ability to link other tables, and to view the results by country. Let's link the UN Data World Population for example, and see how easy it is to use right now:

Open the World Heritage Site table and click on Merge
on the left hand side, arrow down and "states_name_en"
at the top right, type in or select "unpop.csv" and leave Country selected
at bottom "Save as a new table" named as you wish that will then open
go to Visualize then Intensity map
select Area (World Heritage Site) or Value (UN population) to compare

What I did next is downloaded this to clean it up a little - some country names don't match and result in empty rows in the merger - I also went to the World Bank and got the country surface data also on UN Data website. I then consolidated the World Heritage Site counts by class and merged the UN population and World Bank area data. I also created a table with WHS by area and by population density and area (removed density > 1000, that's only Bahrain and Bangladesh, to have better data plots as views didn't appear to work in intensity maps). This removes the effect country size or population have on the World Heritage Sites count.

It shows that World Heritage sites are much equalised when normalised against area:

Whereas against population density, it's the reverse of the original map - it's the less populated countries that appear have relatively more sites:

Note: all these data are publicly available on my Google Docs (free sign-in required).

These very simple maps from data by country show a variety of ways data can be easily linked and posted in order to enhance static maps. Research data are often far more varied than single maps can portray - however beautifully - and simple web mapping techniques described here can enhance their scope. As maps are important political and policy tools, the ability to easily portray data in as many ways as possible is critical.

Even more Maps R Us

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai) — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 07:04:00 +0000

[06 August update: upgraded phone contracts to smartphones and used Garmin's Navigon to great effect, especially finding hotels and hotspots in those twisty medieval cities...]

So how does all this web mapping stack up @ home? Meaning: would my wife & daughter actually use it? We have for home use two roaming laptops, one netbook in the kitchen and one tablet for travel, and a deskside in the office to access printer & storage, but no phone with internet contract.

I put this idea to the test when we planned a cross-Europe drive from my parents' in SW France to my cousins' in central Hungary via N Italy and Slovenia - it's a direct route I drove ad-hoc (finding motels where happened to be each evening) but off-season and my parents only wished to get home with one Michelin map of Europe - this case it's mid-summer however and my daughter wanted to 'see the sights': if Romeo & Juliet's balcony in Verona is kinda obvious, the castle in a cave in Slovenia is not!

So we start with ye olde Nat Geo Atlas that still had the CIS countries... not good! Then they hit the internet to find more about Arles, Mantua and Ptuj, the three focal points of our crossing - schedule sorted, but how about drive times and hotel locations? Aha! Google maps gets them the broad schedule - things are looking up! - but no one believes the twenty hour drive time with only mileage breakdown, meaning, what is the assumed speed and are there bottle necks, etc.?

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But Michelin reinvented itself and put onVia Michelin most if not more details that paper maps had - hot spots, points of interest and, crucially, drive times - all in the name of estimating costs of travel given fuel, season, currency and speed assumptions: multi-modal maps for the rest of us mentioned here... that really caught their attention! Unfortunately I cannot embed the map, and it has tons of info, so best to see it directly here, but this shows their dashboard:

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Most importantly however, I scraped not only the drive distances but also the drive times and put them into a spreadsheet. I could therefore see Michelin assumed a 60mph average, which is indeed a little optimistic in summertime! Bur having all the details allowed me not only to recalculate with new speed shown above, but also to plan out the stopping points, and play with until I could fit all my daughter's hotspots in seven days! To be honest this was over their head, but they came up with similar time-lines with pen&paper: high-tech calculations with low-tech checks&balances was a good family compromise.

After that we were off to the races: we simply went to Lonely Planet on line, knowing exactly where we wanted to stop, and found hotels available for each night and booked it all on-line in a couple of hours... incl. family bickering over hostels vs. hotels, and puh-lease don't mention camping!

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The key point is that the choices were laid out plain&simple by combining various web maps with routing info and a bit of tinkering.

As a bonus, I wanted to show them the relief in Slovenia using Google Earth, and presto! we even found buildings in Ljubliana... that really sold them! Here's the view northwest from the castle hill, some buildings with more details than others, but cool nonetheless:

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More creative Maps

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai) — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 16:29:00 +0000

I ran across these interesting web-mapping innovations - three on data consumption (multi-modal maps on steroids) and two on data creation (down to earth to outer space).

Planning a cross-continent trip this summer from my paents' in S France to our family@large cottage in Hungary, my wife pointed out www.viaMichelin.co.uk. I'm familiar with paper Michelin maps of yore, that marked chevrons to signal the steepness of slopes - harks back to under powered cars mid last century, but were very handy for cycling which is what I used it for as a teen - or colored lines to signal scenic routes. Not to be outdone the web version marks black spots on roads as well as hotels, in an interactive roadmap on steroids.

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Luck would have it that Caitlin Dempsey @gislounge pointed out an Ancient Rome travel map from Stanford University. It calculates travel times in the Roman era across the Roman empire by season and with travel costs in the currency of the time. It's deceptively simple but entails a lot of calculations, a multimodal map on steroids if you will. I'm not sure what's more amazing, that what takes 18 hours direct today took 43 days two millennia ago, or that we can calculate that at all!

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On the data creation side, Google's AtmosphereOnTour show early this week uncovered an intriguing site from the Met Office. While it does provide data online, it's notoriously hard to extract it and make good use of it. Somewhat of a turnaround is their posting of volunteer weather stations.

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My friend Geo Dailey pointed out the most intriguing app for volunteers to record info on the transit of Venus. On Jun 5 and 6 next week, Venus will swing between Earth and the Sun: measuring the dark speck across the sun disk allowed early astronomers to measure the size of the solar system. This celestial conjunction doesn't happen that often as described my Matt Artz... Geo told me Captain Cook mounted an expedition in the Pacific to measure it in the 18th c.! Well then, contrast that mometous effort with perhaps thousands of volunteers measuring the transit of Venus because:

there's a free iPad app available from Astronomers without Borders and Esri
iPhones have cameras GPS and clinometers built in that allow such measuremts

Captain Cook, Samuel de Champlain and other mariners of the time would sure be surprised to see the equivalent of an astrolabe fit in the palm of your hand! Stay tuned for Geo's web map of that event...

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And with the Diamond Jubilee celebrations under way in England, how could we not mention this other interactive map of the beacons lit across the country as another set of community events? This is IMHO one beautiful map too from Esri(UK).

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Cloud Futures #3: Bridging the Gap

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai) — Sun, 20 May 2012 15:35:00 +0000

Bridging the gap between desktop and on-line GIS follows the first and second instalment, online vector GIS and spatial data validation. GisCloud introduced a free Esri extension to load features and attributes to its file system. This follows other services such as Arc2Earth and Arc2Google, except in the vector domain. Having both Esri @ home and a private cloud I put this new extension through its paces.

East Anglia Fenlands mashup on arcgis.com looks like this on giscloud.com. But how do I get there? First you download and install the extension, and it's added to ArcMap for you. Pressing the single button in ArcMap pops up this screen:

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Log in via your social media or own login, select the layers to export et voilà! layers get uploaded: 9 layers at 1900 features each totalling 58Mb took 9 min. on a 1mbps up / 20mbps down ADSL line on a stock HP Pavilion g6 notebook running ArcGIS 10 for Home Use (read: ArcView with all extensions).

As with online validation, the usual lessons learned are almost as interesting as the process itself... It's so easy, we have to get something more out if it, don't we? Here are mine:

UK Ordnance survey data come in British National Grid (ORD SURV GB) with a defined datum but not ellipsoid, which posts as Transverse Mercator with unnamed ellipsoid and datum, and thus fails the GIScloud import but posts as unprojected
a simple reprojection to WGS84 in the file geodatabase fixed that and posts like so:

You can follow Socium's on-line validation output (triangles where adjacent polygons differ by more than one unit). The best part of it, however, is that it took longer to write this blogpost than it took to upload, fix and re-upload the data! How's that for ease-of-use from Esri and giscloud.com?

Petroleum GIS then and now

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai) — Sun, 06 May 2012 17:44:00 +0000

Exprodat published a free eBook: Why use GIS in petroleum?, an excellent state-of-play as well as good industry marketing to augment their impressive blog. Does their Figure 1 not have a certain air of déjà vu, however, compared to Figure 1 of my article in CADalyst written 25 years ago?

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Those were however very different days! AutoCAD was a front-end on pre-Windows PCs just entering a Unix workstation market. Just trying to connect with Sun workstations or download data over 9600 baud modems - that's 1.2 kbps or 1000 times slower than a 1 mbps line today - to create a township grid and overlay data in prehistoric mashups for proximity analysis... And Operation Database was still two years away from stating: "Geographic information systems are infrequently used in exploration and production, which represents less than 2% of the total GIS sphere"... And the web? What web?

Mar88CADalyst

As a footnote, the PC in Figure 3 is the basis for the following comparison:

Mega giga

iPad maps

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai) — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 16:59:00 +0000

Here is a small selection of mapping tools available on the iPad. Some are from the Appstore, others simply from the web. These are screen shots that I took for those (thanks my readers for how-to tips).

Mapbox has an iPad app downloadable for free from the Appstore. It also has a neat twist in that files like KML & TileMill and feeds like GeoRSS and GeoJSON can be loaded straight from Dropbox. This is a KML of Amundsen's dash to the South Pole I looked up on the centennial to Scott's expedition.

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The same can be done with Google Earth, better rendered as it's a globe-based iPad app.

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Giscloud.com on the other hand boasts that with HTML5 you need no App as it works perfectly as-is including fondleslabs. Here's a shot of my project on Medieval Fenlands that includes BGS's onshore and offshore geology as web services.

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Maps I posted on arcgis.com also show well as-is, for example this real-time DIY weather map for the Middle East: post dust clouds and wind direction from NOAA to see the next storm before it comes!

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I think the coolest however is the wonderful Kuwait Community Map posted by Nishant Arora from Esri's local distributor, that shows streets and buildings in glorious detail. Available on arcgis.com, I think it shows best on Esri's free iPad application.

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The upshot is that while there is a variety of apps available for iPads - haven't covered paying ones or custom web maps that can be built for fondleslabs, discussed among others by Esri - web maps appear to work just as well. The advent of HTML5 will especially help render vector maps on smartphone limited bandwidth.

Roundup of web projects

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai) — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 14:46:00 +0000

Is it spring in the air or LinkedIn's new (to me) facility to post projects? Here is a round-up of various projects in the past five years as recently posted on my LinkedIn page:

Medieval Fenlands GIS
April 2010 to March 2012
Also: Sue Oosthuizen, Frances Wilmoth
The recent release of UK Ordnance Survey OpenData opened the opportunity to post H.C. Darby's data from The Medieval Fenland and The Drainage of the Fens of East Anglia in the eastern UK. And parishes are the geographic unit that remained constant since the Middle Ages.

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Captain's ship's logs for the period 1752 to 1855
July 2004 to June 2011
Also: Daniel Schober, George Dailey
This is a sample dataset off the CLIWOC database. This subset tabulates the captain's ship's logs for the period 1750 to 1850, and document the fascinating voyages of exploration in that period. Started on ArcGIS Explorer now on ArcGIS Online.

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Teapot Dome 3D GIS
September 2011 to January 2012
Also: Jeanette Buelt, Tom Anderson
Data from RMOTC located on a 10,000-acre U.S. Department of Energy site within Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 3 (NPR-3). Used target formation tops from RMOTC to try new fault gridded contouring in ArcGIS 10

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GIScloud
July 2009 to Present
Also: Dino Ravnic, Marko Santic
Early adopter of vector GIS in a personal cloud, with data uplaoded as shape files or to postGIS and even via ftp - HTML5 puts it on fondleslabs with no separate app

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Socium On-line Validation
November 2011 to January 2012
Also: Abbie Beckford, Duncan Guthrie
Early adopter of on-line validation service, to test the Medieval Fenlands mash-up of manually enhanced shape files and Ordnance Survey back drop

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Personal web maps using free tools
July 2006 to Present
Also: Christophe Staff, Jo Cook & others
Flat files posted online using Openlayers then Google Maps java scripts - updating some from v.2 to 3 Google Maps API is proving to be somewhat of a challenge

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Google Fusion Tables
October 2009 to October 2011
Also: Martin Lewis & others
Trying out novel way to map data on-line, largest number of hits on my blog with a little help from my friends

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Trending oilelefant.com
August 2009 to October 2010
Also: David Lloyd, Hussein Nasser
Trial social media marketing in aid of a web mapping start-up

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And here are a few more mashups:

NOAA dust cloud and wind speed data on arcgis.com as DIY weatherman in the Middle-East, posted once as a live banner map on this blog...

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Post-your-own joke by country (old GIS Day project)...

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Offshore maritime boundaries as areas of potential boundary dispute...

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And show my octogenerian parents an arcgis.com webmap of mine directly on skype!

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East Anglia Fenlands wrap-up

noreply@blogger.com (Andrew Zolnai) — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 09:57:00 +0000

It may be time to run an overview, two years on this personal project on East Anglia, the last step of which was reviewed by socium.co.uk:

UK Ordnance Survey releases some geo-data for public consumption
two books chronicle Fenlands geo-history since Domesday (1076)
HC Darby penned no less than 60 maps figures over 510 pages of text
notice that Parishes are a constant geo-element over almost 1000 years
so I extend O|S shapefiles with additional columns quantifying wealth
posted in UK guv and academic repository, giscloud.com and arcgis.com
then add web mapping service onshore and offshore geology shown below
and finally online validation services help quality-control various datasets

East anglia fenlands

The human element in all this are Drs. Oosthuizen and Willmoth at Cambridge University, who are indefatigably extending the necessary work to document the past and future uses of a critical area of East Anglia. They're moving to properly archive the well documented Bedford Levels Corporation: that is in itself a wonderful history of public - private partnership to resolve the critical issue of local drainage. But nowadays, not only will climate change affect the agriculture that is still key in this region, but also tourism that is seen as the next big thing in an era of staycation (staying near home for vacations).

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The local element is how much one can read in maps and meeting local people on the current geo-history. I repost this intriguing map above this is a sea level rise map - it may be speculative, but mimics exactly the extend of the pre-drainage marshes - the necklace of villages, two of them with the suffix 'beach' (coastline) and Reach with the remains of Roman docks attests to evidence of a watery past. This region offers a superb opportunity not only to document its historic past in a graphic fashion, but also to make it accessible to the public using current technologies, public data and a little bit of work.