Topic
maps
- Weekend Reading: Summer Solstice, Zoom Learnings, and TeachOSM
šŗ 5 Learnings from Zoom Zoom is one of those admirable SaaS companies built on solid product and amazing execution. I love this ā not relying on anything sexy or super inventive, just solving a known problem better tā¦
- Public Health Mapping for the Pacific Islands
Our friend and colleague Kurt Menke of Bird's Eye View GIS recently conducted a workshop in Hawaii working with folks from the Pacific Islands (Samoa, Marianas, Palau, and others) to teach Fulcrum data collection andā¦
- The Bing of Maps
At the recent WWDC, Apple announced an overhaul to their Maps product, including millions of miles of fresh data from their vehicle fleet, along with a new Street View-like feature called āLook Aroundā. Even though itā¦
- Weekend Reading: The Next Mapping Company, Apple on Pros, and iPadOS Workflow
šŗ (Who will be) America's Next Big Mapping Company? America's Next Big Mapping Company?") Paul Ramsey considers who might be in the best position to challenge Google as the next mapping company: Someone is going to tā¦
- Weekend Reading: Tissot's Indicatrix, National Park Fonts, and Starlink
š Tissot's Indicatrix This is a neat interactive tool to visualize distortion due to map projection using Tissot's indicatrix, a mathematical model for calculating the amount of warp at different points: Nicolas Auguā¦
- Places: Great Slave Lake
Our place for today I found via NASA's Earth Observatory feed: the Great Slave Lake of the Canadian Northwest Territory. While it's a big body of water when you pan over it on the map, it's size is hard to fathom whenā¦
- Weekend Reading: Rays on a Run, Apple's Pivot, and Mapping Grids
ā¾ļø The Rays are a Surrealist's Delight Love to see the Rays getting some deserved attention in the mainstream sports media. They've put together a great, diverse lineup of consistent hitters that have performed well aā¦
- Tidal Resiliency
Yesterday evening I attended a community meeting in our neighborhood on the tidal resiliency plan the City of St. Pete is putting together to combat the periodic street flooding we get during high tidal or rainfall evā¦
- Contours in OpenDroneMap
One of my favorite open source projects ongoing right now is OpenDroneMap. I haven't gotten to use it much recently, but followed development over the last couple years. Outside of some loose testing a while ago, I haā¦
- Weekend Reading: Running Maps, Thinking, and Remote Work
šš»āāļø On the Go Map Found via Tom MacWright, a slick and simple tool for doing run route planning built on modern web tech. It uses basic routing APIs and distance calculation to help plan out runs, which is especiaā¦
- Weekend Reading: Brains and Language, Hillshading in Blender, and Antifragility
š§ Your Brain Needs 1.5 MB of Storage to Master Your Native Language "It may seem surprising but, in terms of digital media storage, our knowledge of language almost fits compactly on a floppy disk," the authors wroteā¦
- The Geography of The Odyssey
I love this piece ā a detailed analysis, backstory, and new map of Odysseus's supposed voyages around the Mediterranean: In 1597 the cartographer Abraham Ortelius became the first person to draw a map of Odysseusā traā¦
- OpenAerialMap: Open Drone Imagery for Humanitarians
I wrote up a post for the Fulcrum blog on using OpenAerialMap with Fulcrum Community. As we invest more in building out our Community platform this year, I'm excited to do more with integrating OAM into our tools. Forā¦
- Mapbox Boundaries
Mapbox has built this curated dataset of administrative boundaries from country level down to local geographic units like arrondissements, prefectures, and districts. Knowing how difficult it is to aggregate and cleanā¦
- Equal Earth Physical Map
Tom Patterson has released a new version of his Equal Earth Map, this time as a physical topographic map style. Beautiful stuff.
- Weekend Reading: LiDAR, Auto Generated Textbooks, and Paleo Plate Tectonics
š£ Creating Low-Cost LiDAR This is a great breakdown of the different elements of LiDAR technology, looking at three broad areas: beam direction, distance measurement, and frequencies. They compare the tech of 10 diffā¦
- What Did the Earth Look Like?
In the spirit of yesterday's post on the Earth of the past, this interactive map lets you browse back in time to see what oceans and landmasses looked like all the way back to 750 million years ago. Try typing in yourā¦
- The History of the World on One Map
Every year since the pre-Stone Age area, visualized as a time lapse on a map. This is amazing and puts into context what was developing where over time. I know when I read the history of one culture, like Ancient Greeā¦
- Weekend Reading: RoboSat, the State of Security, and the Equal Earth Map
š° Buildings from Imagery with RoboSat This excellent guide shows how to combine take imagery from OpenAerialMap and buildings from OpenStreetMap, and combine to train a model for automated feature extraction. It usesā¦
- Topography, Bathymetry, Toponymy
In this latest cartography project I'm working on, I'm rediscovering the tedium of searching for appropriate data. I'll grant that it's amazing how much high quality data is produced and freely distributed, but givenā¦
- topoView
I'm working on a special side project right now, getting myself back into cartography a bit. The last time I did any serious cartography work was with TileMill, probably 4 or 5 years ago. This time I'm trying my handā¦
- 24 Days of QGIS
Each year GIS developer and cartographer Nyall Dawson puts together a thread of daily tweets leading up to Christmas, each with a helpful tip for QGIS. You can see all of them at the hashtag #24daysofqgis. Here are aā¦
- Weekend Reading: Largest Islands, Linework, and Airline Mapping
This week is some reading, but some simple admiring. I wanted to highlight the work of two cartographers I follow that is fantastic. We live in a great world that people can still make a living producing such work. šā¦
- A Globe of Connections
Borders in todayās world are remarkably static, ever-present lines we all get used to separating territories as if there are hard barriers to interaction between the multicolored countries of your average political maā¦
- Video Mapping in OpenStreetMap with Fulcrum
With tools like Mapillary and OpenStreetCam, itās pretty easy now to collect street-level images with a smartphone for OpenStreetMap editing. Point of interest data is now the biggest quality gap for OSM as compared tā¦
- Weekend Reading: Ubiquitous Computing, Versioning SQL, and Video Game Maps
š Computing is Everywhere A great interview with Bret Victor on the Track Changes podcast. His work has always been an inspiration for how to think about both creating things and teaching people. š Git Your SQL Togeā¦
- An In Depth History of Maps
This is the first book review post since I put up my library section. I hope to do more of this in the future with each new book I add to the collection. Enjoy. The Story of Maps took me a while to get through, but itā¦
- Orbiting the Earth, and Other Zen Videos
This is a 92 minute 4K video taken from the International Space Station as it orbits Earth, in real-time: If you've got an Apple TV and used their "Aerial" screensavers, this'll look familiar. Most of those ones are dā¦
- Earth's Wonders Like You've Never Seen Them
The team from Planet, maker of microsatellites for remote sensing, shared this set of images taken by their SkySat constellation. As this technology advances, it's going be a phenomenal resource to make high-accuracyā¦
- Apple's New Map
Another great cartographic analysis from Justin O'Beirne, this time on the latest updates to Apple Maps. Their new data and styling covers mostly northern California, and has some gorgeous computer-extracted natural lā¦
- The Map Collection
Iāve been collecting paper maps for years. Itās one of the few collection habits Iāve allowed myself to keep (well, including books). Some time back I wanted to inventory all of them. So I built an app in Fulcrum to lā¦
- Recent Links: Mapping Air Quality, the Problem with Agile, Indie Jazz
ā± Mapping Street-Level Air Quality in California This is amazing work by Google putting air quality sensors on their Street View cars to collect air quality data. The resolution of this is amazing ā to see how drasticā¦
- Weekly Links: Cartography's Future, Interactive Maps, and Building Moats
š Cartography in the Age of Autonomous Vehicles An excellent, extremely detailed analysis from Justin O'Bierne on how maps and cartography might evolve if autonomous vehicles negate our need for turn-by-turn navigatiā¦
- Aerial imagery with the Mavic
At work we've been building an integration between Fulcrum and DroneDeploy, a service for automating drone flight and data capture for aerial imagery. It's compatible with the Mavic, so I gave it a shot with some testā¦
- Weekly Links: OSM on AWS, Fulcrum Editor, & Real-time Drone Maps
Querying OpenStreetMap with Amazon Athena šŗ Using Amazonās Athena service, you can now interactively query OpenStreetMap data right from an interactive console. No need to use the complicated OSM API, this is pure SQā¦
- Mavic Pro First Impressions
I bought a Mavic Pro a couple weeks ago and just got a chance to take my first flights this past weekend. In short, it's the most impressive technology product I've used in years. I've never owned any drone, so this iā¦
- mapquery
A neat tool for generating graphics from map data for visualizations.
- Addresses and Geocoding: Do New Systems Improve What We Have?
There's been a boom in the last couple years of big tech companies trying to reach to the periphery of the globe and bring Internet access to people without connectivity. Facebook is launching giant solar-powered dronā¦
- A Comparison of Activity Trackers
The concept of activity tracking is getting ever closer to ubiquitous nowadays with the prevalence of dozens of mobile apps, wearable wristbands, and other health monitoring tools like Bluetooth-enabled scales and vidā¦
- Creating New Contributors to OpenStreetMap
I wrote a blog post last week about the first few months of usage of Pushpin, the mobile app we built for editing OpenStreetMap data. As I mentioned in the post, I'm fascinated and excited by how many brand new OpenStā¦
- Topography & Augmented Reality
Generating a real-time topographic map with a sandbox, Kinect, and a projector. This is the kind of thing I want to see more with augmented reality.
- Mapping Kabul
We've just posted a map of Kabul, Afghanistan built from spatial networks map data. I built this a couple of months back (with TileMill) for some mobile field collection project work we were doing with Fulcrum. This iā¦
- WhereCampTB
My talk from Ignite Spatial at WhereCampTB, talking about the OSM Tampa Bay meetup group. Check out the slides in better detail here. It was a fun event a couple weeks ago — great participation from folks in allā¦
- OSM in Commercial Products
OpenStreetMap has become an undeniably powerful open data resource for industry to start taking advantage of. I gave this talk at State of the Map 2011 in Denver to show some of the things our company is doing leveragā¦
- Dymaxion
A dymaxion projection — a sphere projected on a flattened polyhedron.
- The Value of Local Knowledge
The mapping industry has historically underappreciated the human and sociocultural aspects of geography. This talk from the first Ignite Tampa Bay series focused on understanding the value of localized knowledge, andā¦
- WhereCampDC
We just returned from a fantastic weekend up in DC - first at the Ignite Spatial event on Friday night, then the WhereCampDC unconference on Saturday. Being the first event of itās kind that Iāve attended (with the ābā¦
- Traverse Me
{% include image-partial.html file="traverse-me.jpg" description="GPX map of campus" caption="no" width="350" %} The University of Warwick campus map was drawn on foot at 1:1 scale with 238 miles of GPS tracks walkedā¦
- Man vs. Nature
The front lines.
- StreetView on Whistler
For the Vancouver Olympics, the StreetView guys have been hitting the slopes to get imagery from snowmobiles. The little StreetView guy is even a skier.