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.

The politics of London2012 Olympic medal counts

[Update: I noted on many of my Google Fusion Table posts that, while the data are still on Google Drive for you to view, GFT no longer offers a polygon or heatmap option, only geocoding by country centroid in its new version. Not sure why, but on this, this, this and another example posted as Iframes not Scripts preserved the old GFT maps.]

I was curious about the London2012 Olympic medal count - why rank them by gold medals as BBC did, rather than by total medals as perhaps statistically more significant? It kept TeamGB in #3,  ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympic gold medal rank of 4 (rather than ahead of the Russians I'm told). In any case the top two - US and China - stood unchallenged, and every country performed well in what some called the best games ever... even if I hear that at every four years!

More simple maps in current affairs

[Update: I noted on many of my Google Fusion Table posts that, while the data are still on Google Drive for you to view, GFT no longer offers a polygon or heatmap option, only geocoding by country centroid in its new version. Not sure why, but on this, this, this and another example posted as Iframes not Scripts preserved the old GFT maps.]

Geocurrents.info posted an interesting item on UNESCO World Heritage Sites list. I suggested that their otherwise lovely static maps could be augmented via dynamic ones. They're not computer mappers, so I pointed them to Google Fusion Tables as the simplest way to post simple aggregate maps by country. Here is what their maps on World Heritage Site count looks like (note this is still 'beta', as for example Côte d'Ivoire and DR Congo do have sites, and I had to match country names to Google):

Even more Maps R Us

[06 August update: upgraded phone contracts to smartphones and used Garmin's Navigon to great effect, especially finding hotels and hotspots in those twisty medieval cities...]

So how does all this web mapping stack up @ home? Meaning: would my wife & daughter actually use it? We have for home use two roaming laptops, one netbook in the kitchen and one tablet for travel, and a deskside in the office to access printer & storage, but no phone with internet contract.

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.

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.

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:

Illustrative maps in current affairs

[Update: I noted on many of my Google Fusion Table posts that, while the data are still on Google Drive for you to view, GFT no longer offers a polygon or heatmap option, only geocoding by country centroid in its new version. Not sure why, but on this, this, this and another example posted as Iframes not Scripts preserved the old GFT maps.]

The Data section of British paper The Guardian is a great example of illustrating reams of data and helping readers make sense of it - such maps are only illustrations, not exacting science as in my previous post - readers wish to grasp trends for tabular data by country, rather than examine their exact geographies.

"...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?

Critical mass, satellite imagery and GIS

Satellite imagery has been around for almost as long as GIS, and the following may just make them so easy they finally gain momentum. The same way Jeeps and Suburbans had been around for a couple of generations, but only the last generation saw Ford legitimize SUVs with its Explorer.

Another Take on Climate Change, Part IV

[Update: Part V, more on polar wanderings]

From guardian.co.uk today: Goce satellite maps the Earth's gravity in unprecedented precision. Aside from updating on Part III of this series, this slots right into my comment on the lesser-know fact that the earth wobbles on it axis, and that mass plate-tectonic movements are the result as well as the cause of earth tremors along plate boundaries

Another Take on Climate Change, Part III

[Update: Part IV, more on mapping earth gravity]

The time-space map I looked for in Part II is on esri.com... among many others for certes! Note on the map below that the oceanic trenches indeed lie slightly outboard of the Pacific plate boundaries: as suggested earlier the epicenters are at the prow of the major bend in said boundaries; the shift in landmass, however, renders that link even more graphical.

The stunning beauty of Maps, part III

History and current events are a great opportunity for GIS as they allow to disseminate pertinent information fast to those who need it. They bring out the best in map-making I posted here and here already. Not a few websites posted maps on the Japanese catastrophe, here are those I found from watching Al-Jazeera and my favourite blogs.
NOAA tsunami map (I already posted it for Chilean quake exactly a year ago):

Google Fusion Tables for Current Affairs

[Update: I noted on many of my Google Fusion Table posts that, while the data are still on Google Drive for you to view, GFT no longer offers a polygon or heatmap option, only geocoding by country centroid in its new version. Not sure why, but on this, this, this, and another  example posted as Iframes not Scripts preserved the old GFT maps.]

Wolfram Alpha is a search tool that does statistical as well as word searches. This is powerful indeed as it allows to query across diciplines, subjects and techniques. I live in Kuwait now, and the current events made me curious about the distribution of Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Having already used Google Docs and Fusion Tables here and here, I performed the following: