Tag Archive for 'Cartography'

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Interactive light map video

Published on November 5, 2007 in Geotech. Closed Tags: Art, Cartography, Conference, Imagining Europe, Interaction, Map, Maplay, Video, Vienna.

Emanuel posted a short video clip showing how the map projection we recently did works.

We used two vertical menus in our interface: one to show static indicators and one to see relations between selected countries. The static indicators are basically triggered by placing a token on a menu item, then an animation starts playing without much interactive features. On the other menu the user selects an indicator the same way and starts then placing two additional tokens on countries to do comparisons among each other (or moves one token around as it is shown in the clip). The first chosen country is 100% and the value of the following country relates to it, visualized by scaling circles.

We submitted this project to the upcoming Art and Cartography Symposium here in Vienna and are planning to set up the installation there again. I don’t know who else will be attending, call for papers just closed and the program isn’t released yet, but the title itself does already sound very interesting.

German Virtual Earth update

Published on August 31, 2007 in Geotech. Closed Tags: Cartography, Germany, Imagery, Intergraph, Microsoft, Virtual Earth, Visualization.

Good news for all German Virtual Earth mash-ups: Microsoft finished an imagery update for entire Germany, based on data delivered by Intergraph (and GeoContent). According to Intergraph’s press release the new maps provide an accuracy of up to 1m in rural and 50cm in urban areas. Additionally, Microsoft’s fantastic Bird’s eye view is now available for 80 German cities.

GoYellow, based on Endoxon (which was partly acquired by Google), seems to be using the same imagery, but somehow the softer coloring and cartography do look better in Virtual Earth.

Theresienwiese in Munich in Virtual Earth:

and in GoYellow:

Same imagery, different visualization. [via Geobranchen.de]

Happel Stadium I hope Austria will follow soon. Next year the Euro 2008 is happening here and the main stadium in Vienna still looks a bit fuzzy. Some parts of Austria are well covered by Herold maps (the Austrian yellow pages company), but they don’t provide an API, so no luck for external applications.

An Austrian Atlas

Published on February 27, 2007 in Geotech. Closed Tags: Atlas, Austria, Cartography, Europe, GIS, Mapping, Open source, Regional science, Spatial Planning.

Since end of January one of the largest projects I’m currently involved in is online and open for public access. We decided as first step to publish it silently before the official announcement and receive more user feedback as well as reserve some extra time for fine tuning.

It’s a national atlas (ÖROK-Atlas online is the official name) containing socio-economic information, mainly focused on the Austrian territory but providing a European perspective as well. The entire application is based on 100% Open Source software like MapServer, PostGIS, GDAL, Proj4 and other usual geo open source suspects.

You won’t find any fancy AJAX driven user interface or high-res imagery to sneak a peek into your neighbor’s garden. Instead you’ll be able to visualize a comprehensive collection of predefined maps as entry point to a large database of socio-economic data and indicators relevant to regional analysis and spatial planning. An important user group, already involved in the development process, were decision makers and other administration departments (ministries, federal states).

Traditionally the atlas was published annually on paper. It was one of the main challenges of the project to transform those rather complex printed maps (most of them containing multiple socio-economic information layers, multidimensional signatures, etc.) into an online application in terms of retaining the same information content.

We’re still working in the background – the English version isn’t 100% completed yet, data and maps are extending continuously and some bugs need to be fixed – so please be patient if something isn’t working as expected.

Learning cartography

Published on November 8, 2006 in Geotech and Tech. Closed Tags: Cartography, Google Maps, Web 2.0.

With the release of API version 2.67 Google introduced the so called GMarkerManager class. It seems to be an easy way to control the amount of displayed markers in your Google Map, depending on zoom level and scale.

Apparently some good old basic cartographic knowledge is essential, even for the fast living Web 2.0.

Weather maps

Published on August 4, 2006 in Geotech. Closed Tags: Cartography, Map, Webmapping.

Now that’s what I call a precise weather map!
German perfectionism at its best.

Geoblogger.eu clean-up

Published on April 30, 2006 in Geotech. Closed Tags: Aggregation, Cartography, Geoblogger, GIS, Neogeography.

In order to avoid post duplicates I cleaned up geoblogger.eu and removed all feeds which are already aggregated by planet geospatial. So geoblogger.eu should now be a nice add-on to planet geospatial, for people interested in mainly non-english geoblogs.

E like Easter and .EU

Published on April 18, 2006 in Geotech. Closed Tags: .eu, Aggregation, Cartography, Geoblogger, GIS, Neogeography.

As you may have noticed, or not, there is a new top level domain available: .eu.

I got caught by the landrush two weeks ago and registered 2 new domains too.

If I didn’t mess up with my redirects you should see the first one above in your browser’s URL bar: spanring.eu. It’ll be my new main domain name for this site. During Easter holidays I found the time to change my server configurations and update DNS, etc. If you have any bookmark or subscription please change the URL to spanring.eu. Well, the old one, spanring.name, still works and will do so for at least another year. Probably even longer, because there is a good chance that I’ll keep this domain too.

The second domain I bought was geoblogger.eu:

geoblogger.eu is an aggregation of GIS, cartography or “neogeography” weblogs based in Europe or in any other way Europe related. The aim is not to exclude the rest of the world but to focus on the European scene and to give a general overview about people, organisations or topics of interest in this region. [more]

The main idea behind geoblogger.eu was quite simple: publish and share geo related parts of my reading list. Maybe somebody else finds this site and links useful or, even better, has some recommendations on further weblogs to include. If so, feel free to send an email to ask[at]geoblogger.eu.

I’m well aware about geobloggers.com, the former Flickr Google maps geotagging mashup, but geoblogger.eu just says in one word what this site should be about. If there is any problem in terms of registered name or something, please let me know.

The newsfeed on geoblogger.eu isn’t working properly. I’ll try to fix it within the next few days.

Social Explorer simplicity

Published on March 5, 2006 in Geotech. Closed Tags: Apple, Atlas, Cartography, Census, Planning, Usability, Webmapping.

Recently I came across the mapping tool called Social Explorer (via Cartography). It’s based on Flash technology and offers exploration of U.S. census data.

Since more than a year now we are working on a similar application for Austria. It’ll let users explore Austrian and European census data along with other information relevant to spatial development. Within the last year I could observe the focus of development shifting from technology driven discussions (e.g. offering advanced GIS functionality) to cartographic *correct* geodata and finally emphasising on user-needs. After the event people often have the wonderful gift of hindsight, so now I know that we should have put more weight on initial user-requirements discussions. Technology is a fascinating thing and we all were caught by visions of tools we would like to integrate.

A noticeable aspect of the Social Explorer is its simplicity. The first screen of our application contains more or less the same elements. We start with pre-defined maps, the user can switch between various topics and load different maps, we have of course zooming & panning, something similiar to that slide-show tool and the possibility to create reports containing tables and diagrams. But somehow the Social Explorer interface appears more clearly and easier. At a glance you know what you can do and what this tool has to offer, in our application it’s still more trial and error. A colleague hit the nail on the head by mentioning “It’s the American approach, keep it simple. We got the European approach, to make it more complicated than it actually is.”.

During the next months we’ll concentrate more on interface design, clean it up while keeping the same functionality to achieve a higher deegree of usability. In the end, usabality (beside marketing) is crucial for a popular application.

If you’re interested in interface design and mapping/cartographic applications you should definitely have a look at the Atlas of Switzerland, an amazing cartographic product.

Every time thinking about usability, interface design, etc. I recall an interview about Apple’s one button mouse, which they used to produce until last year. Asked why they still put only one button on their mice while other PC-mice offer I don’t know how many buttons and wheels the Apple employee answered: “Considering that Apple users have only one button available, Apple developers are forced to keep the interface of their applications simple in order that users can operate them with only one button.”. A way to guarantee Apple’s hallmark, the ergonomically designed user interface.

World population

Published on December 10, 2005 in Geotech. Closed Tags: Cartography, Distribution, ICC 2005, Map, Politics, Population, Power, World.

Fascinating: Map of the Earth with countries sized by population (via BB). I saw it already this summer in the maps exhibition at ICC 2005. Power and distribution are the words that came to my mind.

German digital earth roundup

Published on November 23, 2005 in Geotech. Closed Tags: Cartography, Digital-earth, Geoinformation, GIS, Google Earth, Map-2.0, Virtual Earth, Webmapping.

For all who are able to read (and understand) the german language: there is an interesting article by Martin Soutschek about recent development and impacts caused by Google Earth & co on the geo scene available on Runder Tisch GIS e.V.

I totally agree with all outlined points why Google Earth, Google Maps, etc. are “cool” and “sexy”, but I would like to add one more aspect: the deep personal link between user and geo data created by those spatial applications. What I really could observe on people while they where using Google Earth was that they where searching for places they know. Of course this is a well known habit when people use maps, but suddenly people could see their house, hometown, street, etc. from bird’s eye view. All the abstraction, the hard work done by cartographers, was gone. People identified themselves with what they saw on the map, with all the objects displayed on a image of the world as they know it. Without the use of this partial high resolution imagery this effect wouldn’t have occurred. To bind users on a grand scale one has to access subconscious emotions.

Another point is a result of the impressive usability. Those new services are in general fast and easy to use. A result of this handy usability is that people can use this electronic maps in a way they did it with traditional paper maps. Google Earth allows one to add and save marks on the map, people used to mark their personal points of interest on paper maps. Because of the new map media new methods of map use were found. Now it’s possible to see what other people mark on their maps, one can share places. Freely available APIs inspired developments like geotagging, to add coordinates to photos or other web content and link it with certain places. The way how people interact with digital maps is changing. I think people have fun using those maps. Instead of just using maps to find the shortest connection from A to B they certainly enjoy them.

Sure, Web 2.0 is the buzzword of the year, but I think the cartographic adaptation towards Map 2.0 explains somehow the user-centered approach of those new generation spatial applications.

However, it’s hard to predict what’s coming next. If this whole thing is just a huge geo bubble which will implode soon or if geo applications will soon be an essential part of our everday life. Still more interesting is how GIS industry, cartographers, public authorities, etc. will take part in this development and react on the invasion of companies like Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, etc. into their territory.

Another point of view on Google Earth brought in by a colleague (a planner) of me: “Google Earth is the proletarysation of geoinformation” – freely available geoinformation for everyone!