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11 items tagged "Mapping"

Related tags: Internet [+], and [+], Politics [+], Crime [+], collaborative [+]

All Points Blog

Maps of Georgia (or lack thereof) Cause Google to Scramble; Use Virtual Earth

Posted: August 14th, 2008, 8:34pm CEST

Tags: Politics and Mapping

Where's the street map of the Republic of Georgia? Some media outlets are crying foul as Google scrambles to explain why they did not have any maps of the war-torn region. You can get satellite images for sure but the road detail is vacant. So, don't go searching for detail around Tbilisi or Gori. Miguel Helft, writing in the New York Times, interviews folks at Google who say simply that they never had very good coverage in this region and did not intentionally remove any data.

Not so for Yahoo Maps. Road data on Yahoo does exist but looks no better than the old 1:100,000 Defence Mapping Agency (now NGA) maps so it, too, is somewhat incomplete. Zooming to street level will show that neither Yahoo nor Google has any coverage.

But the winner is Microsoft Virtual Earth. Now, whether this was done recently, only they know for sure, but the road detail is excellent. Perhaps folks from the VE group can chime in here.

I would not put this all on Google, Yahoo or Microsoft. Politically sensitive regions have little detail. Take the disputed region of Kashmir. It has great satellite imagery (almost too good) but no road data. And the imagery is spotty. For an interesting example, use this link to a KMZ file of Skardu, a small town in Pakistan, very close to the border with India. The imagery is extraordinary but don't pan away too far or you will lose the higher resolution image.
Map Hawk - Watching the Media and How it Uses Maps

Posted: July 28th, 2008, 10:46am CEST

Tags: Politics and Mapping

Map Hawk is a newly launched blog that will focus on maps and mapping technology in use by the mainstream media. With the upcoming U.S. elections the Olympics and ongoing world events, Map Hawk will document and explore the use of maps in print, online and televised media. You'll find my coverage both here on APB and at MapHawk.blogspot.com. I hope you'll join the conversation, send comment s, subscribe to the daily newsletter and participate in the ongoing polls. See the first poll on how CNN should improve their mapping capabilities for the presidential election.

GIS Lounge - Geographic Information Systems

Printing Free on Mapquest

Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 12:32am CEST by Caitlin

Tags: Internet Mapping

The Mapquest Developer Network announced that printing maps (from developer applications) is now free. According to the post the conditions are as follows: You can print up to 5000 copies of a map per run/publication The printed map can be up to a maximum of 8.5″ x 11″ inches printed It has to be a free publication (flyer, [...]
Getting Ahead of Crime Using GIS

Posted: July 1st, 2008, 1:17am CEST by Caitlin

Tags: Crime Mapping

Sara Barbour from Miller/McCune magazine writes a summary article on the use of GIS to predict criminal behavior. The start of the article reviews a crime case in which spatial analysis was used to pinpoint and subsequently arrest a sex offender in Toronto. Manny San Pedro, an officer with that police force is quoted as saying [...]
PolicyMap

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 6:09am CEST by Caitlin

Tags: Internet Mapping

PolicyMap offers over 4,000 different indicators covering demographics, economics, housing and mortgage information, crime and other neighborhood level datasets. There is a free registration option that gets you access to a great deal of the functionality offered on the site. If you need access to current year or 5-year projected data then the site offers [...]

All Points Blog

CNN Exemplifies Problems with Static Web Services in Election Coverage

Posted: May 7th, 2008, 3:02pm CEST

Tags: Politics and Mapping

Yes, I too saw John King of CNN doing the "stretch and shrink" act on the touch screen last night and Paul Well's comments notwithstanding, I have a different take. What's going simply illustrates the problem that many users of web services, like Google Earth, are and will face when it comes down to wanting more than what it was designed to do.

First, King does a fantastic job and to the extent that CNN has the right statistics at his fingertips is quite good...for what it was intended to do. What is was NOT intended to do was get down into finer demographic detail and display additional political boundaries nor could it query the political districts for certain data that King so desperately wanted at his fingertips.

The CNN political geography map web service that they constructed becomes inadequate when situations like the one that occured last night for Lake County Indiana. Lake County had votes outstanding and was late in reporting results. Everyone is focused on this single county to give them the Clinton/Obama vote given the closeness of the primary election. And here's Mr. King manually drawing in the congressional districts with his finger to try to assess where he "expected" each candidate to have a better chance of pulling votes. It didn't work. The level of voting detail was not there for him to truly predict the results. What he was trying to do was to mark the congressional district boundaries and then overlay the satellite image to those boundaries to look as rural versus urban areas. Obama was pulling better statewide from the urban areas; Clinton from the rural, white communities.

It served as an example of what happens to the expectations of users who believe that a static, web service will do just fine until there is a need to drill into the details. We saw this happen to products like MapPoint 2000 when just simple thematic mapping quickly becomes inadequate when you try to do more advanced analysis and ask questions that it was never designed to accept. The same is true for the CNN Touch Screen. It doesn't have all the boundary data like congressional district maps or precinct maps (which I am sure will be needed eventually). And while the satellite maps are nice it, seemed like Mr. King was a little ill-prepared to describe the geography other than being able to point to rural vs. urban areas and found himself not knowing some of the geography (like the I90 toll road for which he was grasping). He really needed another overlay of the road network and additional POI data.

So, I continue to revel in the CNN coverage just because the maps are now a highlight of the evening..and yet there is so much more that could be done. Linking to live vote counts by precinct? You know it's coming.

GIS Lounge - Geographic Information Systems

Online Mortgage Maps

Posted: April 27th, 2008, 11:50pm CEST by Caitlin

Tags: Internet Mapping

The Federal Reserve has released dynamic maps showing subprime and alt-A mortgage loan information across the United States. While the concept is very interesting, it seems that the Flash application was developed with little understanding of cartographic principals. The chloropleth maps are available at the ZIP Code level but the pop-up statistics only show information [...]
Top Causes of Errors in Online Mapping Systems

Posted: April 9th, 2008, 12:48am CEST by Caitlin

Tags: Internet Mapping

Spatial data errors in online mapping and GPS navigation systems can send travelers off on the wrong route sometimes with comical but sadly, sometimes deadly results. Having been burned by trusting online driving directions before, Chris Silver Smith from Search Engine Land reviews the top reasons online mapping sites have bad data. Reasons he lists [...]
Take Control of Your Maps

Posted: April 9th, 2008, 12:34am CEST by Caitlin

Tags: Internet Mapping

Paul Smith (developer of EveryBlock), has a broad article entitled “Take Control of Your Maps” on the “A List Apart” site that takes a look at open source online mapping options other than Google Maps. The article is a good introduction to some of the basics of getting started with open source map servers such [...]

Mapping Hacks

Free Map India, 2008

Posted: February 14th, 2008, 10:19pm CET by Schuyler

Tags: collaborative Mapping

I have been perhaps a bit remiss in not mentioning this here sooner, but Mikel Maron and I are currently engaged in facilitating a series of mapping workshops all across India, informally known as Free Map India 2008. So far we have met with Indictrans in Pune, and organized two-day workshops focused on seeding OpenStreetMap communities in Mumbai and Trivandrum. Tomorrow, we leave for Bangalore for another workshop, and then, in rapid succession, we’ll be visiting Ludhiana, Delhi, and Calcutta before the end of February.

The idea for the workshops came about when Mikel casually mentioned to me at the GeoNetwork workshop at WHO in Rome back in November that he was hoping to visit India early this year. Since this seemed like a golden opportunity to introduce him to the embryonic Free Mapping community there, we agreed to offer to host a series of workshops and see what happened. The timing seemed particularly good, as OpenStreetMap has come into its own in a big way in the last year or so, but the project has yet to really take off in India.

Aside from a massive (and, being apparently mostly VMap0-derived, woefully inaccurate) data contribution from AND, very little of India has been mapped in OSM. Yet there is no intrinsic reason why it shouldn’t be: India has a growing and very capable pool of technical expertise, and more than ample access to the requisite technology - i.e. GPS receivers and decent ‘Net access. Arguably, with government data access policy in India being muddled at best, and with the growing pains that have attended her race to industrialize, the need for Free and Open map data in India is even greater than in Europe or in the UK, two places where the OSM data set really shines.

My experience with this has been limited to the Mumbai Free Map, a dataset that I helped organize and publish in collaboration with Shekhar Krishnan of CRIT in Mumbai, and which I made reference to in my Where 2.0 talk last year. The problem with the Mumbai Free Map has always been that the loop was never closed: We were able to make it possible for people to visualize this rich data set about the city of Mumbai, but we never had the time or the resources to make it possible for non-technical individuals to actually update or maintain the data set, or really to do anything useful with the data. Meanwhile, the OpenStreetMap community has gone ahead and done just that with the OSM database.

So it’s been particularly gratifying to me to have been able to leverage, with Shekhar’s inestimable assistance, the network of collaborators from last year’s Free Map workshop in Mumbai. Local organizers at each stop have stepped forward and provided venues and travel assistance, making the whole thing possible - meaning that Mikel and I will be visiting and facilitating meetings or workshops in seven cities across India in a little under a month.

The response we’ve received so far has been pretty amazing. Our fervent hope is that these workshops will help inspire and enable key individuals in each locale to start organizing regular mapping parties; indeed, rumor has it that some are already being planned in our wake in Bombay. Hopefully, with Indictrans’s help, and the support of CRIT, we will soon be getting all of the Mumbai Free Map data loaded into OSM.

Mikel has been dutifully recording our progress on his weblog, and posting photo updates to Flickr. Also, he’s posted some videos of GPS tracks made by the workshop participants to YouTube, which we have been assembling with some code from the OSM Subversion repository. The second Mumbai video, particularly, is quite lovely. Do keep an eye on these media sources, if you’re interested, as we hope to update them regularly.

Thanks are due to very many people here in India for their tremendous generosity, particularly Nagarjuna G., Alpesh Gajbe, Prof. Jitendra Shah, Swapnil & KK & the whole Indictrans team, Prof. Venkatesh Chopella, T. B. Dinesh, Kiran Jonnalagada, Gora Mohanty, Prof. H. S. Rai, Indranil Das Gupta, and a whole host of others we still have yet to meet… You all rock. Jai Bharat mata!

GIS Lounge - Geographic Information Systems

Goodbye Chicagocrime.org, Hello EveryBlock Chicago

Posted: February 5th, 2008, 7:34pm CET by Caitlin

Tags: Crime Mapping

Adrian Holovaty offers a retrospective on why he’s shutting down chicagocrime.org. Chicagocrime.org mapped crime data from the Chicago Police Department and was one of the early applications that “mashed” geographic data onto Google Maps. Visitors to the original chicagocrime.org are now redirected to EveryBlock Chicago which Holvaty describes as “chicagocrime.org on steroids — more than [...]

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GISWiki.NEWS.Reader » Tags » Mapping

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11 items tagged "Mapping"

Posted: August 14th, 2008, 8:34pm CEST

Tags: Politics and Mapping

Posted: July 28th, 2008, 10:46am CEST

Tags: Politics and Mapping

Posted: July 22nd, 2008, 12:32am CEST by Caitlin

Tags: Internet Mapping

Posted: July 1st, 2008, 1:17am CEST by Caitlin

Tags: Crime Mapping

Posted: June 23rd, 2008, 6:09am CEST by Caitlin

Tags: Internet Mapping

Posted: May 7th, 2008, 3:02pm CEST

Tags: Politics and Mapping

Posted: April 27th, 2008, 11:50pm CEST by Caitlin

Tags: Internet Mapping

Posted: April 9th, 2008, 12:48am CEST by Caitlin

Tags: Internet Mapping

Posted: April 9th, 2008, 12:34am CEST by Caitlin

Tags: Internet Mapping

Posted: February 14th, 2008, 10:19pm CET by Schuyler

Tags: collaborative Mapping

Posted: February 5th, 2008, 7:34pm CET by Caitlin

Tags: Crime Mapping