Monthly Archive for December, 2009

Heating up SVG

Published on December 12, 2009 in Geekery and Geomensch. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

Last week I came over Raphaël, a great JavaScript library for vector graphics visualizations, and I started playing around with maps and SVG again. Long time no see!

To bring some map content from ArcMap to Raphaël I used the VBA Macro I wrote 4 years ago in ArcMap. It still does the job and gives me clean vector graphics the way I want them. I couldn’t find a decent SVG export option for QGIS, although there are some efforts to improve that kind of functionality.

AsSVG, a Python geoprocessing script for ArcGIS is pretty good too. It provides some nice export options, such as pick style and data attribute fields, and I actually ended up using it a lot.

However, it’s 2009 and there are other ways available for sharing code then just providing a plain text file. So I ended up wrapping a bitbucket repository around it. Just in case if somebody is interested in working on or improving the script…

What can Towns learn from OpenStreetMap?

Published on December 7, 2009 in Geomensch. Closed Tags: , , , , , , .

Last week at the Ignite Spatial: Boston event I gave a short talk – 5min, 20 automated slides, 15sec each – about OpenStreetMap and why I think it can be interesting for town administrations to look at the OpenStreetMap model. In a nutshell:

  • OpenStreetMap is successfully based on open crowdsourcing, a horizontal multi-directional work-flow model, to build and maintain the world’s largest free geospatial database.
  • Open crowdsourcing helps to collect local knowledge across your residents, improve local geospatial data, engage residents and provide a 24/7 feedback loop for them.
  • Wide variety of data and information distribution: OpenStreetMap allows output from raw data access for developers to print map renderings for tourists.
  • Built-in data interoperability: no matter how many or in what part of the world people are contributing to the project, it all fits together to one piece.

Bottom line: towns should take a serious look at OpenStreetMap and the underlying model. It’s proven to work in many places and provides some valid points town administrations can benefit from.

There should be videos of all presentations online at some point. My colleagues Holly and Chris talked about our 3D video game/planning participation project in Chinatown and about the 10 most wanted data sets (and one state GIS department at stake) we would like to see to for better planning decisions in the Metro Boston region.

Update: Videos of Ignite Spatial: Boston are now available on YouTube. That’s me, struggling through the format ;-)