From static to dynamic maps, my travel so far

I tell people "I know just enough java to be dangerous", and it has served my well in my prior attempts logged in my old web page. These were all Google Maps API v.2 I built about 5 years ago. This blog as well as my new map catalog showed how I built maps in QGIS then ArcGIS, and then posted them on giscloud.com and AWS via Mapcentia GeoCloud2. I recently posted maps on arcgis.com on desktop and smartphone, static results of 'traveling salesman' geoprocessing on the desktop or online.

Map catalog page 4

My map catalog also works well to post new projects: added British Geological Survey web mapping services to East Anglia web map, in order to compare historic and current geology. The Snapshot format also give a variety of viewing options of the catalog.

Mapping Tropical Storm / Hurricane Isaac

A map slide show last year tracked dust and wind storms in Kuwait. I simply refocused it on the Gulf of Mexico to track the tropical storm Isaac, predicted to gain hurricane strength by land fall in Louisiana. It shows NOAA's cloud cover, wind direction and alert areas detailed here. [Please be patient as this map may take a while to load.]

"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.

New look and banner maps

You will have noticed that the banner picture is now a dynamic map... The monsoon season has passed and the hurricane season is starting: So let's augment the previous image of dust cover with NOAA's wind speed map too, shall we? You can zoon in&out or pan across the banner too! And you may have to "wait a sec" for the display to refresh. But I simply used the "embed" feature of ArcGIS Explorer maps, available from other packages too, and reformatted the entire banner to accommodate that.

Simple Feature or Full Feature Specification for OGC?

The issue of how to write-to and read-from geographic databases has been around for quite some time. Esri shapefiles were a runaway success partly because of their open specification. As we moved onto spatial databases, the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) offered the simple feature specification (SFS) that all the players could read to or write from. This came in especially handy for consuming web mapping services (those and many other specifications have grown since). But it gets trickier when it comes to reading from and writing to spatial databases generically. By that I mean not from the native application but from others', like with shape files.

Even more beautiful maps in current affairs

I'm baaack! Here is the web mapping service directly in ArcGIS Explorer (AGX). This was posted two weeks ago as a layer package on arcgis.com. I wondered then why AGX would not accept OGC WMS services? While I was away ESRI Support responded with two caveats:

More beautiful maps in current affairs

As I'm off for two weeks you get next week's posting today! Following last week's blogpost on Esri's beautiful ocean base map, I painted over it (to use their simile) Goddard Earth Sciences' stunning near-real-time global sensor data for:

More maps for the rest of us

I recently updated a simple web map of my travels using Java on Google maps, to spice up my homepage of old that was just text. It's part of two map samplers here and here. Still working on getting the latter onto arcgis.com, keepya posted on how their Java API handles this map...

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?

Gathering clouds over the horizon, Part IV

Slotting straight into my previous post, ESRI just released ArcGIS Explorer (AGX) online and arcgis.com as the new ArcGIS Online (AGO). I cannot, however, see my old AGO postings on the new arcgis.com, neither will the new AGX online consume it - not even posted as a web mapping service (WMS)!

Gathering clouds over the horizon, Part III

Eyjafjallajoekull volcanic ash blown southeastward caused air traffic disruption last week over the northern British Isles again. I post the North Atlantic section of NOAA's free web mapping services of global cloud and chemical composition:

What is next big thing?

Recent groundbreaking news abounds, and both an exciting and challenging times lie ahead.