Vectors are your friend, Part III

Esri just updated its World Vector Basemaps (v.2). I updated below the notoriously complex and details Aalan Archipelago offshore Turku, Finland. I contrasted in this blog 4½ years ago posting the GSHHG world vector dataset in giscloud.com, a web vector mapping system, and ArcGIS Online, richer in data but then in raster. See an OpenStreetMap backdrop earlier in my companion blog.

More map catalog

Last week was the inaugural post of my catalog, highlighting maps from this blog in (very) roughly reverse chronological order. The second entry make the display options more evident, as this is meant to be a light and flexible version of this more complete blog. I am not about to end its success quite yet, and have no fear I will post items of substance as well as cross-links to the catalog until it has its own followers.

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.

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:

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:

"Vectors are your friend"

HTML5 Canvas was a natural extension for giscloud.com:  Its distinction is to post vectors on the web, overlaying rasters like any GIS, and with a optional postGIS running in the background. Not only does this speed up drawing maps on the web, it also allows massive amounts - in the millions of points, lines and polygons - to render PDQ (pretty darn quickly) - thus Vectors are your friend - my moderately complex maps benefit from even clean&crisper renderings of polygons as expected and of tiled images especially.