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.

To Geo or not to Geo, that is the question...

... at least in oil&gas. I always wondered why petroleum was only 5% Esri's market (unofficial from my tenure as petroleum manager there, they publish no figures as a private company). A current rationalization project at an oil major hinted why - I've 'pushed Geo' for 25 yrs. so I saw that in my previous tenure at Halliburton, but that only crystallized later - whilst a large percentage of data has a spatial component in oil&gas, only a small part of it is stored in spatial databases. GIS are generally for surface infrastructure like geology, plants and pipelines, rather than for subsurface exploration and production. Surface data can actually be seen and measured directly on or near the ground, whereas subsurface are interpolated data from drilling and seismic deep in the subsurface. Indeed the challenges in oil exploration in the news of late revolve around this frontier.

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:

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):

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.

SAGE: Syndication, AGgregation & Entitlement

For-free vs. for-fee is an issue that won't go away any time soon. I discussed this here before, and it came up recently with the adoption of OpenStreetMap on Bing Maps and arcgis.com. In a macro sense it's about data, systems and traffic control, as evidenced by the lock-down of Google search and Blackberry access in China and parts of the Middle East, respectively. At a micro scale it came up in a discussion group on LinkedIn: who owns map symbology derived from public sources?

The power of context, Part III

[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.]

Ruth Lang created this excellent mashup for the 2010 FIFA World Cup - which coloured all the countries at the beginning and gradually greys them out as they are eliminated - only Spain and the Netherlands are left as at today. This was a labour of love, needing for example some tweeking to work in the Firefox browser, and a testament to SVG.

Web 2.0 in action

The recent announcement of data.gov.uk under none other than Tim Berners-Lee is a great step towards freeing UK data to the public - I won't reiterate the arguments going back and forth between for-free (tax-paid) and for-fee (cost recovery) - and such availability has raised eyebrows even in the land of the free - namely, how useful is it to the end-user ranging from guv contractor, thru spatial business to end-users, perhaps in decreasing order of patience &/or savvy?