Free tools & data to predict hurricanes

Four weeks ago I blogged here about the availability of open data, posting it on the open web and its potential social impact. Two weeks ago I blogged here too about tracking three hurricanes in the Caribbean via the brilliant but closed earth.nullschool.net. In between I compared & contrasted open & closed regimes on my Medium channel... and that 2½ yrs after a previous blog here on same!

Emergency response maps as easy as 1-2-3

Update 5: read here my  new occupation inspired by this 18 months later
Update 4: for a predictive app using Esri & Alexa, see this example in Maryland
Update 3: presented at European Petroleum GIS Conference in London, 2 Nov 2017
Update 2: Medium professional channel posting on Open Data issues raised here
Update 1: Youtube of  freely available data show flood spread from 27 to 30 August

Crowdsourcing for disaster response

Esri Petroleum & Amazon Web Services shows

click to enlarge

Releasing data really works, Part VII

And now for something completely different - the original posts until Part VI are listed below - I ran across a nice map of Steve Feldman's: He also tried out free data and software to map UK flood maps, an up-scaled version not for professional re-use.

New business, renewed website

[Update: find on my map blog the full story on how the video below was created]

Since www.zolnai.ca will be the landing page for my new business, I spruced it up to reflect my new brand.  zolnai.ca is indeed now registered in England as a Sole Trader.

The banner has been changed to show some example web maps created since 2006, a topic will be renewed at center page, and the navigation has been improved.

Releasing data really works, Part VI

Three months into posting data on my web service - Part V - I created a short list of free data for Great Britain on my Map Catalog called GB Freebie.

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.

Map catalog continued

In my ongoing suite of posting webmaps in my new and fresh Mind the Map blog, here is another take on loading global vectore megadatasets but this time on Amazon Web Services direct via Mapcentia's GeoCloud.

Standards & Metadata, Part VIII

My previous post on this topic stated how careful documentation and appropriate metadata high-grades any information that is shared online by giving origin, context and other information. It helps build bridges and I quipped a well-known tear down this wall that also closed my second last post on free data and apps.

Releasing data really works, Part V

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.

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

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):

Blog readership Sept 2009 - 2012

Three years into moving to my blog page, here are a few stats on pageviews. Thanks to everyone especially @google, @slashgeo and @cageyjames for helping spread the word.

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:

More creative Maps

I ran across these interesting web-mapping innovations - three on data consumption (multi-modal maps on steroids) and two on data creation (down to earth to outer space).

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:

More maps R us

Continuing the ongoing (re)discovery of cool maps for the rest of us, here are two I found on Facebook from my friends Christophe Staff in Belgium and Aidos Malybayev in Kazakhstan.

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).

How education has changed my life and what I did about it

I consider myself a citizen of the world, as shown in the map below. Born as my parents fled Hungary right after 1956 Uprising. Raised on the expat circuit of an oil company. Emigrated to north America as a student. Lived most of my adult life in north America. Recently repatriated to Europe, yet still work abroad. Education has been a constant thread in my life: first through graduate school, then running continuing education for a local  geological society, and now managing GIS in the resources sector worldwide.