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.

Esri Petroleum & Amazon Web Services shows

click to enlarge

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.

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.

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

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:

Releasing public data really works!

[03 Nov 13 update: "relooped the loop" by testing the corrected Ordnance Survey data
Feb 2013 update: Ordnance Survey cartography stylesheets made available for QGIS
19 Jul 2019 update: reposted it on ArcGIS Online]

UK Ordnance Survey released Open Data to the public two and a half years ago. English Parish boundaries have been more or less constant since the Domesday survey in 1087. That allowed me to post University of Cambridge Don HC Darby and Yale University student Julie Bowring socio-economic data, by simply adding attribute data to the Ordnance Survey shape files. That onerous, if one-time, task was entirely manual: when 1SpatialCloud launched Online Validation  it seemed only natural to try it out; they actually wrote some simple rules and we thus co-branded as quality assured by 1SpatialCloud Online Validation Service wherever I posted the data. Here are the resulting error shape files:

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:

On-line spatial data validation, part II

[2013 update: Socium is now 1SpatialCloud]

Three weeks ago I introduced Socium's Online Validation Service (OVS). I showed the Ordnance Survey vector data QC, on the UK Parishes used as a geographic unit for the Medieval Fenlands project. Two weeks ago Socium kindly created a new rule, to post unexpected variations in adjacent feature attributes. In an essentially agricultural era, economic wealth of the Domesday period was quantified by Darby via the number of plough teams per parish. That is the attribute the rule was written for (it's hard-wired right now and Socium plans to add metadata pick lists in the future).

Cloud futures #2: on-line spatial data validation

[Update: follow ups for this project are Releasing Data Really Works Part I and Part IV]

Following vector maps on the web (cloud futures #1), here is a freemium online validation service (OVS) that helps us QC, quantify and clean up spatial data on the web. A speciality of 1Spatial is its spatial validation, an essential first step to setting up proper spatial data infrastructure. They spun off 1SpatialCloud to offer the same service online.

Clouds gathering over the horizon, part V

Will spectacular outages of AWS and now BT cloud services casts a pall over the excitement that has reached even politicians? And now comes this geopolitical issue only hinted at by MSFT's tribulations in Europe over Internet Explorer. This posted in Germany (Google Chrome will translate this page for you) by Ruth Lang - 'SVG queen' to Dino Ravnic 'web vector king'.

"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.

"...with a little help from my friends", Part II

James Fee cracks me up every time. First he does not dance on ArcObjects' grave but praises it, secondly he exults Google Earth Builder until he, well, hits nothing, and best of all he sees off Esri's webADF to welcome its REST API. Currently in the business of hosting data on the web, his head is not in the clouds but bolted on tight by business concerns, mostly clients' who gives them a certain sharpness as they're always right, right?

Baaack in the arcgis.com

[rhymes with: Baaack in the USSR] After a brief hiatus trying my hand outside ESRI, I'm baaack... posting maps on arcgis.com. Daniel Schobler from ESRI(DE) Schools Program kindly reposted and time-enabled my Global sailings, captains ships logs 1750 - 1850 into his Explorations and voyages 1662-1855 (time-enabled)

"The proof of the pudding is in the making"

The FOSS4G conference early this month in Barcelona raised a host of issues as usual. One picked up by James Fee and Jo Cook's blogs among others, is the role of SpatialLite in particular and exchange file formats in general? My main takeway is Jim's point, that while file exchange formats are important, efforts should be focused on internet exchange formats. We all agree that it's usage eventually that will dictate future formats, rather than vendors or standards bodies...

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:

Gathering clouds over the horizon, Part II

I posted earlier an example of a simple Google Map reading a list of Olympic cities - this was part of a list of Google and OpenLayer maps I built over the years on my old website - I also posted a nifty display of plate boundaries in Google Earth here. Following on the discussion of new web mappping (Part I of this post), I recreated both on giscloud.com to see how the two implementations compared.

UK electoral boundary changes

New UK Ordnance Survey OpenData Bounday Lines released this month, show changes compared with the original public release in April of October 2009 data. Both Electoral Division and Westminster Consituency boundaries are what you see in the BBC News or many other UK election maps on TV or online. Following yesterday's parliamentary and county council election results, one might ask: