Story Maps are your friend

Simple story maps help scientists make important work a lot more relevant to their audience, by putting their story at the front. The maps and data are there in their completeness, but out of the way as supporting materials. This adds a twist to a growing list of  on-line map stories and community maps, and I was motivated by past work with reporters to better cover news.

Blog readership Sept 2009 - 2012

Three years into moving to my blog page, here are a few stats on pageviews. Thanks to everyone especially @google, @slashgeo and @cageyjames for helping spread the word.

Releasing data really works, Part II

[Oct 2012 update: Here is an example on how much further map stories can be taken]

Here is another simple example of posting data as maps on-line, in order to help linguists this time elucidate spatio-temporal relationships on not-insignificant amounts of data.

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:

Mapping Tropical Storm / Hurricane Isaac

A map slide show last year tracked dust and wind storms in Kuwait. I simply refocused it on the Gulf of Mexico to track the tropical storm Isaac, predicted to gain hurricane strength by land fall in Louisiana. It shows NOAA's cloud cover, wind direction and alert areas detailed here. [Please be patient as this map may take a while to load.]

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 creative Maps

I ran across these interesting web-mapping innovations - three on data consumption (multi-modal maps on steroids) and two on data creation (down to earth to outer space).

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.