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

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.

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.

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):

Maps are forever (Part II)

I wrote earlier about a 1610 map from the Harvard University Library of the Cambridge UK region, a snapshot of which I simply edited the tear and restored it by eye-balling it in Photoshop Elements. I detailed before some local history and geology too.

Mapping languages on the internet

[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.]

Let's explore global language distribution from World Mapper, then language usage on the internet as seen from Wikipedia. This was inspired by an article in The Economist as well as data I previously collected an posted on Google Drive to explore various topics on Google Fusion Tables.

"Free Google" e-Book review

JM Internet Group published a guide to "Free SEO, Social Media, and AdWords Resources from Google for Small Business Marketing". I am offering it an honest review as a former net'preneur - I use the internet social media round-trip to help along this blog today and oilelefant.com a while back, and shared my experiences on SlideShare. I also create web maps, and without any further technical ado let's say Google were less than forthcoming in providing help with crossing an API upgrade... This echoes  author Jason McDonald's (JM) reason to write "Free Google..." in the first place! He set out to render explicit for the rest of us what is implicit to geekdom and help 'free Google' from itself.

"The shots heard around the world"

Recent mass shootings in the US and elsewhere affect me in a particular way: My parents grew up in Nazi then Soviet occupied Pest, on the east shore of the Danube overlooked by the Buda Castle (dark green below), from which guns fired down streets perpendicular to the river (grey at right below), so residents literally ran the gauntlet across those streets, and friends of my parents lost a babe in arms from a stray bullet; my parents thus emigrated just before my birth to give me a better life, but that included six months in Algiers during a revolution where I too witnessed two fatalities early 1961.

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):

East Anglia Fenlands wrap-up

It may be time to run an overview, two years on this personal project on East Anglia, the last step of which was reviewed by socium.co.uk:

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.

2nd anniversary blog

[30 Sept. udate: I posted my Google Page Rank to the right: its jump from 2 on my website to 4 here is a further indication of how dynamic social media improve over static web. I also wrote on further social media dynamics I used in oilelefant.com last year.]

Hard to believe a year's gone by since my first anniversary blog! I compiled a few stats and posted them on Google Docs, here they are. NOTE: I don't have data where a premium is charged for it.

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: