More creative Maps

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:

1. there's a free iPad app available from Astronomers without Borders  and Esri 
2. 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

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.

Petroleum GIS then and now

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?

iPad maps

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).

Roundup of web projects

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:

East Anglia Fenlands wrap-up

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:

More maps R us

Continuing the ongoing (re)discovery of cool maps for the rest of us, here are two I found on Facebook from my friends Christophe Staff in Belgium and Aidos Malybayev in Kazakhstan.

Multi-modal maps R us, part II

Last week I reported Google Maps' released of multimodal transportation mapping in the greater London UK area (GLA). I mused that this rendition was more visually appealing that Transport for London's website. The 'granddaddy' for train and tube in London extended beyond GLA to be used from larger surrounding centres - I myself used it regularly from Cambridge an hour train to the north.

Multi-modal maps R us

Google multi-modal maps are so significant to greater London Area commuters that I cannot pass it up. Ed Parsons posted it on his blog and I immediately tried it: it's just the ticket (pun intended) living near Cambridge about an hour north of London and travelling around London only by public transit.

“Au revoir” RMOTC dataset, part VII

“Lucky 7”, this is my closing post on the RMOTC series on subsurface 3D data, to explore reservoir depletion, pipeline routing and gridding/contouring. This also ends for now my tenure in Kuwait, where I prepared this dataset for a training tool. Follow me on LinkedIn to see where I'll go next...