Fort McMurray (Canada) Wildfires Social Map

[20/05/2016 update: noticed the dearth of social feeds? People are busy fleeing the area!
Also come back often as, sadly, fires that receded last week were returning this week...]

The wildfires around Fort Mc Murray in NE Alberta of W Canada were well covered in the press. Their origin is introduced in the splash screen below, which includes a broader context in the NASA brief. A modified pre-existing DIY Weathermap for Kuwait, especially the wind information, added info for Fort McMurray and MODIS data, whose hotspots are indicative of fires. Features inspired by Esri Disaster Response maps were finally styled with social feeds below. Twitter feeds for #YMM (airport code), #YMMfire and #YMMhelps were added to Flickr, Instagram and Youtube for the previous 5 days.

"... with a little help from my friends", part III

25 years ago this week, I left the Natural Resources Canada to start a business with Teknika. I was encouraged (if not pushed) along by a fellow geologist, who had a comprehensive petroleum geocomputing system at Husky in Calgary - his colleague encouraged me at University of Calgary to take a class in computer sciences, the same department where Jim Gosling later on created Java. I teamed up then with a brilliant surveyor who delivered a video-tracing system. These were the DOS days when we used AutoCAD as the graphics prior to Windows. And as my banner note states, he spatialised AutoCAD with a 10Kb DOS kernel that might've given Intergraph and Esri a run for their money, had AutoDesk picked it up at the time.

Arctic Dreams, Part II

As the Arctic comes under more scrutiny in the news, I'm reminded of my visit up there 25 years ago when we actually thought of global cooling! But the issues of access and exploitation are certainly not new... And I posted a few polar maps for fun here and here, though the best rendition can be found here.

"... with a little help from my friends"

On my 100th posting last week I found some interesting statistics. I use Google's Blogger for its sheer simplicity. And I just found out it offers stats and maps helping track readers.

Reading Social Web Maps

Look at this map, and what it doesn't show is as instructive as what it shows. You guessed it, it's the low number of social media hits - anyone on the blogosphere or twitterverse would find those numbers on the low side, especially considering the passion current events in Egypt generated on the ground and online - and I wager doesn't reflect poor map making, but rather the fact the web was tampered with during the events in Egypt.

5 Ws for citizens-as-sensors

Des Kilfoil at the CBC in Calgary, Canada introduced me 20-odd years ago to the 5Ws, the basic tenets of any investigative reporting, from journalists to police, from Wikipedia:

• Who? Who was involved?
• What? What happened (what's the story)?
• Where? Where did it take place?
• When? When did it take place?
• Why? Why did it happen?
• How? How did it happen?

A bit of GIS history

As I watch ESRI's 2010 User Conference remotely via social media and my favorite bloggers like spatialsustain and spatiallyadjusted, this entry from allpointsblog caught my eye:

The Big Easy button

Building geoinfo from the ground up is patent in this Gov2.0 presentation on citizen-focussed geoweb at the Greater New Orleans Community Data Center toward sustainability in the Big Easy:

The stunning beauty of maps, Part II

The beauty of maps is topical not only thanks to British Library's show Maginificent Maps. Gary Gale waxed rhapsodic on map as art, and Thierry Gregorius mused on what a map might look like after visiting the same exhibit.

Data tennis match

There is a frantic discussion over the UK Government Data Developers mailing list, over freeing UK postcodes, after the recent freeze of their provision to UK aid agencies. As a business user (not a developer) I use free area code data (kilometer precision), and paid my £50 for 1000 points from postcodeanywehere.co.uk (meter precision). This doesn't negate the need to call for freeing up data sources, but as business I must be practical and timely.

The Joy of Sets

Set Theory was the first disruptive technology I experienced as a boy - perhaps my web diagram to the right was influenced by that? As it turned out sets made binary thinking cool in the new era of computing, as they did holistic thinking in business management. In earth sciences it helped correct the linear thinking of chronologically evenly spaced events, into that of long periods of quiescence punctuated with bursts of evolution or catastrophic events - and now that we look for asteroids and tsunamis in history, we find them galore.

Geocommunity2009

I followed UK's premier GIS meeting hosted this week by AGI in Stratford-upon-Avon UK, on its excellent website and twitter (#geocom and other attendees). You can read there that the debate over FOSS vs. COTS is morphing into GIS vs. neo-geography. But I found the following to be very a-propos for petroleum: Yahoo!Geo Technologies' Gary Gale explains in his blog the importance of a global geographic ontology - that is identifying not only by location, but also by metadata and by topology.

Arctic Dreams

I spent a summer in the Arctic in 1986, the year as Barry Lopez wrote a book titled as above. At a recent job in Kazakhstan, I met ice engineers whose colleagues I knew in Calgary two decades earlier! How do you get marine engineers and naval architects in the middle of two continents in Calgary and Atyrau? By developping offshore oil&gas in the Arctic Islands and the Caspian Sea!