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Steven Lee and Lior Ron from Google, Inc. presenting "The Evolving Geoweb" at Where 2.0 2009.

Source: http://where.blip.tv/file/2143974/ via @googlemaps

Bytes of the Big Apple RSS feed

The Department of City Planning's Bytes of the Big Apple family of data, applications and base map files now has an RSS feed of new product releases and notices about existing products.

Beta version of OASIS

The beta version of OASIS is now online and the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center is looking for feedback.

A video tutorial of the site's new features is available at http://www.urbanresearchmaps.org/oasis/tutorial.htm and a summary of how the OASIS maps have changed is located at http://www.urbanresearchmaps.org/oasis/about.html.

via the GISMO Yahoo! Group.

Andrew Turner's "Beyond Google Maps" presentation at the 2008 Future of Web Apps Expo in London.

Source: Future of Web Apps Expo

This is an impressive presentation! More than just Google Maps (Andrew didn't choose the title), it should be called "Evolved Maps, deconstructed."

Andrew begins with a brief history of mapping, including African story mapping and Polynesian navigation maps. Along the way he touches on the intersection of geography and meaning (psychogeography), slippy maps & spinny globes. Turner's Introduction to Neogeography (O'Reilly) is worth checking out if you haven't already.

So where next? How to do real rich geographic applications?

Neocartography: Mapping Design and Usability Evolved

Designers are dropping maps into their applications with little concern for usability or design and users are getting "Google Map fatigue." We need to move beyond the simple pin-dropping and consider appropriate mapping interfaces. This panel will look at the current and emerging tools to provide compelling geographic interaction and visualization.

• Andrew Turner, Mapufacture
• Michal Migurski, CTO, Stamen Design
• David Heyman, Axis Maps LLC
• Elizabeth Windram, Senior User Experience Designer, Google

Please note: These notes were typed and published live. I'll clean them up at some point in the future. Audio forthcoming.

Andrew started with a slideshow of where we’ve come from: past/present comparison. Driving directions from the 20s compared to Google Streetview. Took old concepts and moved to the Web. Where has it worked/not worked. New paradigms for what is possible with cartography. (Will Turner post to SlideShare?)

• http://tr.im/carto_questions
• http://delicious.com/tag/sxsw+neocartography

Red dot fever

When the Google Maps API first really hit the scene lots of web programmers mashed up locations with Google maps and used a red splodge as a location. When you have lots of these symbols on a map you get a screen view that looks as if your PC has come down with measles, hence red dot fever.

Read the rest of this entry »

From NYC Resistor:

Russ Nelson is going to be in town and he's organized an OpenStreetMap mapping party!

Hey, want to come out and make NYC a better place to live whilst having fun at the same time? OpenStreetMap is a community-generated open source map of everything you think is interesting. "If you want it mapped right, you've got to map it yourself." Don't have the skills? Well, that's what a mapping party is for! We'll have GPS receivers to loan out, we'll give you some instruction and turn you loose on an unsuspecting city. You gather interesting positional data, come back and we'll show you how to place that on the map. Give it an hour or so and it shows up on the map that everyone can see. The parties are Saturday, 14 February, and Sunday, 15 February, 11 am to 4 pm, both at Radiance Tea House south of Central Park South. Details here on the OpenStreetMap wiki.

An O'Reilly webcast presented by Andrew Turner on 24 October 2008.

In this live webcast, geospatial web expert Andrew Turner will discuss the current evolution of Where 2.0 and how it is affecting the entire landscape of Web 2.0 and next generation applications. Open standards such as GeoRSS, KML and Microformats provide a huge wealth of information for mashups and applications, and libraries such as Mapstraction can be used for cartographic visualization. To illustrate the power of these tools, Andrew will talk about some interesting applications and hacks that have pushed the boundaries of the GeoWeb.

We'll also take a look at the future of location-enabled applications and services that developers can use today to provide users with better contextualized and localized information. Mobile sensors, augmented and immersive reality, and geo-games are just a few of the next generation Where 2.0 domain.

Andrew will also give a short demo of the just-launched GeoCommons Maker.

Source: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/e/1156

I created a tutorial that will step one through how to create a density map with Prototype, the Google Maps API and the HeatMapAPI. The final product, a density map of liquor licenses in Milwaukee, WI, is below. While this map is based on real data, one limitation of the free HeatMapAPI is that only 100 data points can be submitted per call. Since there are approximately 1,300 liquor licenses in Milwaukee, this map isn't even close to accurate!

Creating a map like this takes four simple steps:

1. Getting everything ready
2. Create the Google map
3. Add the data
4. Create the density map

To step one!

Note—HMGoogleOverlay is an undocumented method of the HeatMapAPI. The documentation here is unofficial and unauthorized, and it simply represents my best guess as to what HMGoogleOverlay is.

class HMGoogleOverlay

A HMGoogleOverlay augments the map with a density map image. It implements the GOverlay interface and thus is added to the map using the GMap2.addOverlay() method.

Constructor

Note—HMGoogleOverlay does not have any public methods. It does not support either show() or hide().

via Donna Genzmer:

All right, this is what I like to see: power to the people, public participation style, open source applications! gCensus was built by a Ph.D. student in computer science at Stanford University who was fed up with the slowly rendered, crappy display of the Census Bureau's online mapping interface. His question (our question): why can't people have access to dynamic, high-resolution maps without paying the ginormous bucks for professional GIS software? His answer: gCensus

It's "an effort to make geographic data freely and easily accessible to the public, without the need for expensive GIS software packages. With Google's excellent free mapping program Google Earth, you can use this site to visualize a wide variety of data best displayed on a map. Currently, only the US Census 2000's Summary File 1 (displaying population characteristics such as race and age) is available for mapping."

Right now, though, gCensus is more proof-of-concept than ready-to-release application. It needs to integrate more datasets, and it would probably benefit from other eyes looking at the code. So, here's the flip side to radical democracy—with free software comes great responsibilities. "The student" is looking for development help and hardware and hosting donations. Contact him at gcensus [at] gmail [dot] com and let's make this happen!

From AnyGeo via Donna:

There's an easy way to search for all KML files available on the Web using Google Search. Simply enter the following string to search for a KML file for Brooklyn:

filetype:kml brooklyn or filetype:kmz milwaukee

Note the vast number of results. You can refine your search or add even more detail if you'd like better results. Similarly, if you'd like to locate an AutoCAD DWF format file, try this search string:

filetype:dwf brooklyn