It took five days (after hours) to stand up, learn, tweak and display my East Anglia Fenlands project on Mapcentia's web service. It started with a GISuser group post on LinkedIn on Monday, I used my Amazon Web Service free EC2 trial and GeoCloud2 under beta, and by Friday I had it working and styled. No small thanks to Martin Hogh's original work and help, the result is a simple yet modern and pleasing web map.
My web presence
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Sunday 15 December 2013
Sunday 8 December 2013
Free Petroleum Geodata
Here are some free datasets useful for petroleum mapping. Links didn't transfer in SlideShare so here they are:
AAPG GIS Open Files
AAPG GIS Open Files
Sunday 17 November 2013
Around the world in 30 maps
[Update 2: this map gallery is now the first pane of my personal portfolio]
[Update 1: Apple iOS doesn't support Flash, please try this old link instead]
I revamped my blog to make its header more engaging. I replaced the static image I changed from time to time, with a map gallery. It comes from a Flickr slide show of maps I have collected over time, posted in chronological order. Although each screenshot is captioned and tagged in Flickr, here is the text in the same order:
[Update 1: Apple iOS doesn't support Flash, please try this old link instead]
I revamped my blog to make its header more engaging. I replaced the static image I changed from time to time, with a map gallery. It comes from a Flickr slide show of maps I have collected over time, posted in chronological order. Although each screenshot is captioned and tagged in Flickr, here is the text in the same order:
Sunday 3 November 2013
Releasing data really works! Part IV
[Update: this was summarised into a story map here posted also on this blog here]
Two years then one year ago I QC'd UK Ordnance Survey data for East Anglia, and sent the polyline spike and kickback errors to the Agency, who posted the corrections this year. They noted the errors I reported fell below their own QC criteria, but they invited me to retest their updated dataset. This issue is topical as posted on GISlounge on the same topic proposing other tools.
Two years then one year ago I QC'd UK Ordnance Survey data for East Anglia, and sent the polyline spike and kickback errors to the Agency, who posted the corrections this year. They noted the errors I reported fell below their own QC criteria, but they invited me to retest their updated dataset. This issue is topical as posted on GISlounge on the same topic proposing other tools.
Sunday 20 October 2013
Releasing data really works, Part III
More and more free data are available that are quality-controlled and verifiable. Guardian Data Blog's @smfrogers (now at Twitter) was quite sanguine about this:
Comment is free, but facts are sacred
Saturday 17 August 2013
To Geo or not to Geo, that is the question...
... at least in oil&gas. I always wondered why petroleum was only 5% Esri's market (unofficial from my tenure as petroleum manager there, they publish no figures as a private company). A current rationalization project at an oil major hinted why - I've 'pushed Geo' for 25 yrs. so I saw that in my previous tenure at Halliburton, but that only crystallized later - whilst a large percentage of data has a spatial component in oil&gas, only a small part of it is stored in spatial databases. GIS are generally for surface infrastructure like geology, plants and pipelines, rather than for subsurface exploration and production. Surface data can actually be seen and measured directly on or near the ground, whereas subsurface are interpolated data from drilling and seismic deep in the subsurface. Indeed the challenges in oil exploration in the news of late revolve around this frontier.
Sunday 19 May 2013
A tale of two cities: web maps new and old
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.
Labels:
ArcGIS Online,
cloud,
ESRI,
for-fee,
for-free,
giscloud.com,
Google,
HTML5,
kML,
OGC,
OpenStreetMap,
webmap
Sunday 21 April 2013
Vectors are your friend, Part II (updated)
[Update: ESRI blog post here for clear explanation and treatment of same, thanks Eileen Buckley! See also my ArcGIS Online / Amazon Web Services update at bottom...]
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:
Monday 1 April 2013
RSPB2013 bird counts mapped
Releasing data really works, Continued
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):
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):
Saturday 23 March 2013
Maps are forever (Part II)
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.
Wednesday 13 March 2013
Mapping languages on the internet
[Update: I noted on many of my Google Fusion Table posts that, while the data are still on Google Drive for you to view, GFT no longer offers a polygon or heatmap option, only geocoding by country centroid in its new version. Not sure why, but on this, this, this and another example posted as Iframes not Scripts preserved the old GFT maps.]
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 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.
Wednesday 20 February 2013
"Free Google" e-Book review
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.
Saturday 9 February 2013
Local maps one year on from Kuwait
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.
Wednesday 2 January 2013
Google Fusion Tables for new Google Maps?
[Update: I noted on many of my Google Fusion Table posts that, while the data are still on Google Drive for you to view, GFT no longer offers a polygon or heatmap option, only geocoding by country centroid as evidenced below. Not sure why, but on this, this, this and another example posted as Iframes not Scripts preserved the old GFT maps.]
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.
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.
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