Web Maps on Steroids, Part II

I showed a couple of months ago ways to post mega-datasets online without choking the system. This month OSGeoUK gave me the opportunity to present the same on PostGIS Day 2014, as postGIS was the backbone of two of these examples on GIScloud and GeoCloud2. Thanks to OSGeoUK and British Computer Society for hosting this.

Web maps on steroids

The last 6 blog posts over the last 3 months chronicled the use of dynamic maps using time attribute - years for historic ship tracks and wind data from same 150-350 yrs ago - not to animate maps but to filter them by decade and manage data fetches on ArcGIS Online. A parallel series of posts showed mega data sets on Amazon Web Services, as Mapcentia assured me postGIS handled giga datasets...

On joining and merging historic multi-lingual geodata

Earlier posts chronicled the history even the beauty of historic shipping and climate data from CLIWOC. British, Dutch, French and Spanish maritime agencies transferred paper logs to digital records. In doing so look-up tables allowed to convert multi-lingual records into quantifiable attributes. Something odd (to me) happened in the process of mapping these: over 1/4M records doubled to almost 1/2M when look-ups were joined and then wind and direction tables merged to create maps symbolised by wind force and orientation.

Be your own weatherman

Dust storms are what you look out for in Kuwait. The banner map was a very simple way for me to create my own weather map:

1. where are the dust clouds?
2. what is the wind direction?
3. when will Kuwait get one?

5 Ws for citizens-as-sensors

Des Kilfoil at the CBC in Calgary, Canada introduced me 20-odd years ago to the 5Ws, the basic tenets of any investigative reporting, from journalists to police, from Wikipedia:

• Who? Who was involved?
• What? What happened (what's the story)?
• Where? Where did it take place?
• When? When did it take place?
• Why? Why did it happen?
• How? How did it happen?

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: