Historic Fenlands Mashup

[See updates at bottom, and predecessors Medieval Fenlands GIS and Post-medieval Fenlands GIS]

Here is a mashup on giscloud.com of the geographic history of land cover and surface geology of East Anglia since Domesday based on:

Gathering clouds over the horizon, Part II

I posted earlier an example of a simple Google Map reading a list of Olympic cities - this was part of a list of Google and OpenLayer maps I built over the years on my old website - I also posted a nifty display of plate boundaries in Google Earth here. Following on the discussion of new web mappping (Part I of this post), I recreated both on giscloud.com to see how the two implementations compared.

Cloud Futures #3: Bridging the Gap

Bridging the gap between desktop and on-line GIS follows the first and second instalment, online vector GIS and spatial data validation. GisCloud introduced a free Esri extension to load features and attributes to its file system. This follows other services such as Arc2Earth and  Arc2Google, except in the vector domain. Having both Esri @ home and a private cloud I put this new extension through its paces.

Historic climate data revisited - 4 - polar is POpuLAR

[Update: Part 5 will be the last installment as mentioned at the bottom of this blog-post]

Having explored polar maps here, here and here, was it ever a delight to find one of the earliest maps in that same projection! In This Is the World's Largest and Oldest Map, Culture Trip report how David Rumsey recreated a digital copy of a 1587 map from Milan in no less than 60 pieces:

UK electoral boundary changes

New UK Ordnance Survey OpenData Bounday Lines released this month, show changes compared with the original public release in April of October 2009 data. Both Electoral Division and Westminster Consituency boundaries are what you see in the BBC News or many other UK election maps on TV or online. Following yesterday's parliamentary and county council election results, one might ask:

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.

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:

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:

From static to dynamic maps, my travel so far

I tell people "I know just enough java to be dangerous", and it has served my well in my prior attempts logged in my old web page. These were all Google Maps API v.2 I built about 5 years ago. This blog as well as my new map catalog showed how I built maps in QGIS then ArcGIS, and then posted them on giscloud.com and AWS via Mapcentia GeoCloud2. I recently posted maps on arcgis.com on desktop and smartphone, static results of 'traveling salesman' geoprocessing on the desktop or online.

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.

Clouds gathering over the horizon, part V

Will spectacular outages of AWS and now BT cloud services casts a pall over the excitement that has reached even politicians? And now comes this geopolitical issue only hinted at by MSFT's tribulations in Europe over Internet Explorer. This posted in Germany (Google Chrome will translate this page for you) by Ruth Lang - 'SVG queen' to Dino Ravnic 'web vector king'.

"Vectors are your friend"

HTML5 Canvas was a natural extension for giscloud.com:  Its distinction is to post vectors on the web, overlaying rasters like any GIS, and with a optional postGIS running in the background. Not only does this speed up drawing maps on the web, it also allows massive amounts - in the millions of points, lines and polygons - to render PDQ (pretty darn quickly) - thus Vectors are your friend - my moderately complex maps benefit from even clean&crisper renderings of polygons as expected and of tiled images especially.

"...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?

Esri, Google and if the shoe fits...

[Update: a Google business partner's view of things, 3 mo. after the fracas]

[Here is a further update based on input from other people on what is surely a timely topic. Originally posted on LinkedIn Pulse as The (Geo) Internet of Things, it's posted there for a wider audience.]

Historic climate data revisited - 5 - live polar maps

Here are the maps promised at the end of the last post c/w description in that post:

A brief web history of mine

Update: re: my last paragraph, I restored my personal portfolio as a re-post of my original www.zolnai.ca here and my professional portfolio as a free-tier for developers here.

As I wind down my blog posts and I quit socials, perhaps this may be a good time to reflect on my Web journey that started almost 40 years ago (a recap of my IT journey is here)...

But wait... Tim Berners-Lee didn't invent it til just over 35 years ago (Wikipedia)! That's because I had a site dubbed HTTP in 1986, see inset below:  "world wide web" hadn't been coined yet, but I knew as a student at late 70's University of Calgary of Ted Nelson's failed Project Xanadu (Wikipedia), to try and link all forms of knowledge via hypertext; it failed partly due to Nelson's eccentricity,  partly because there was no global network to carry it. 

iPad maps

Here is a small selection of mapping tools available on the iPad. Some are from the Appstore, others simply from the web. These are screen shots that I took for those (thanks my readers for how-to tips).

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:

From static to dynamic maps, continued

Last month I reported on posting on arcgis.com some time-stamped, time-slider or time-aware maps - I showed my WhereIsAndrew map - I also mentioned how time-sliders are a great way to roll-up diverse datasets that are time dependent. CLIWOC Captain's ships logs was the other example cited, and I proceeded to post it as a service from ArcMap on arcgis.com.

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.