Alfredo Covaleda,
Bogota, Colombia
Stephen Guerin,
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
James A. Trostle,
Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, USA
Source: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/05/geocommons_shar.html
GeoCommons, Share Your GeoData
Posted: 23 May 2007 01:59 PM CDT
By Brady Forrest
GeoCommons is a new mapping site that allows members to use a variety of datasets to create their own maps. It provides the free geodata, a map builder tool,the ability to create heat maps, and a map hosting site. An API will be available shortly. GeoCommons comes from FortiusOne, a Washington, D.C. company. The public Beta is going to be releasedWhere 2.0's launchpad. Monday, May 28th, at Where 2.0's launchpad.
When building a map you can use one of the 1500 data sets (with 2 billion data attributes) that they have made freely available. The data sets vary widely and include things like “Identity Theft 2006”, “Coral Reef Bleaching – Worldwide”, “Starbucks Locations – Worldwide”, and “HAZUS – Seattle, WA – Resident Demographics”. As you can see below, data can be viewed in a tabular format prior to loading it onto a map. Data sets can be combined together so that you can see “The Prices of Living in NYC & SF” and “Barack vs. Clinton – Show Me the Money! ” — it seems to me that Barack has more widespread support.
We are finding O'Reilly's Radar an increasingly valuable site/blog to keep up with interesting developments in Web 2.0, publishing and the general Digital Revolution. Brady Forrest's contribution below is an example.
See http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/05/trends_of_onlin.html
Trends of Online Mapping Portals
Posted: 21 May 2007 04:34 PM CDT
Last week there were several announcements made that show the direction of the online mapping portals. Satellite images and slippy maps are no longer differentiators for attracting users, everyone has them and as I noted last week there are now companies that have cropped up to service companies that want their own maps. Some of these new differentiators are immersive experiences, owning the stack, and data!
Immersive experience within the browser – A couple of weeks ago Google maps added building frames that are visible at street level in some cities. These 2.5D frames are very clean and useful when trying to place something on a street.
Now the Mercury News (warning: annoying reg required; found via TechCrunch) is reporting that these builds will soon be fully fleshed out.
The Mercury News has learned that Google has quietly licensed the sensing technology developed by a team of Stanford University students that enabled Stanley, a Volkswagon Touareg R5, to win the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. In that race, the Stanford robotic car successfully drove more than 131 miles through the Mojave Desert in less than seven hours. The technology will enable Google to map out photo-realistic 3-D versions of cities around the world, and possibly regain ground it has lost to Microsoft's 3-D mapping application known as Virtual Earth.
The Mercury News has learned that Google has quietly licensed the sensing technology developed by a team of Stanford University students that enabled Stanley, a Volkswagon Touareg R5, to win the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge. In that race, the Stanford robotic car successfully drove more than 131 miles through the Mojave Desert in less than seven hours.
The technology will enable Google to map out photo-realistic 3-D versions of cities around the world, and possibly regain ground it has lost to Microsoft's 3-D mapping application known as Virtual Earth.
The license will be exclusive, but don't think Google will be the only ones with 3-D in the browser. Microsoft has had 3-D for a while now (unfortunately, it requires the .NET framework; my assumption is that the team is busy converting it to SilverLight). 3-D is going to become a standard part of mapping applications. The trick will be making sure that the extra data doesn't get in the way of the user's quest to get information. Buildings are slow to render and can obscure directions.
This strategy is a nice compliment to their current strategy of gathering and harnessing 3-D models from users. Currently these are only available in Google Earth. The primary location to get them is Google's 3D Warehouse. I suspect that we will start to see user contributed models on Google Maps.
No word on how many cities Google will roll out their 3D models in or when the new data will be available via their API.
Data, Data, & More Data – Until recently, search engines did not provide neighborhoods as a way of searching cities. Neighborhoods are an incredibly useful, if hard to define, method of defining an area of a city.
Google has now added neighboorhood data to their index, but they have not really done much with it. If you know the neighborhood name then you can use that to supplement searching a city. However, if you are uncertain or if you are unaware of the feature, then you are SOL. There is no indication that the feature exists, how widespread it is, or what the boundaries of the neighborhood are. I hope that they continue to expand on this feature.
Ask on the other hand has done a great job with this feature (see above). They surface nearby neighborhood names for easy follow-on searches (see below). They show you the bounds of the neighborhood quite clearly.
Ask is using data from SF startup Urban Mapping. Urban Mapping claims complete coverage of ~300 urban areas in the US and Canada (with Europe coming). This isn't an easy problem. Urban Mapping has been working at it for quite sometime and are known for having a good data set. They have also been aggregating transit data. An interesting thing to note is that many of the same neighborhoods available on Ask are also available on Google maps (examples: Tenderloin, SF: Google, Ask; Civic Center, SF: Google, Ask) No word yet if any of the other big engines are going to add neighborhood data, but my guess is that it will soon become a standard feature; it's too useful to not have.
Own the Stack – Until recently, Yahoo! used deCarta to handle creating directions (or routing). They have announced that they have taken ownership of this part of the stack and have built their own routing engine. Ask and Google still use deCarta. Microsoft has always had their own. Yahoo! is hoping to make their new engine a differentiator. In some ways this is analogous to Microsoft's purchase of Vexcel, a 3D imagery provider. Microsoft did not want the same 3D data as Google Earth or any other search engine for its 3D world.
I think that any vendor servicing Google, Microsoft, Ask, Yahoo or MapQuest will have to keep an eye on their next source of revenue. Those contracts aren't going to necessarily last too long. The geostack is too valuable to outsource.
There is only one part of the stack that I think *might* be to expensive for any one of the engines to buy or build out right. That's the street data and it's a data source primarily supplied by two companies, NAVTEQ and Tele Atlas. NAVTEQ has a market cap of 3.5 bilion dollars as of this writing; Tela Atlas has one of 1.4 billion pounds. These would be spendy purchases. Microsoft is currently working closely with Facet Technology Corporation to collect street data for cities to add a street-level 3D layer (see Facet's SightMap for a preview), but this Facet is not collecting data to match the other players. It will be interesting to see if Yahoo! parleys its partnershipOpenStreetMap into a data play. with
An interesting piece of analysis and visual infographics posted today on the O'Reilly Radar site. See http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/05/baseball_team_overpaid.html
Assuming you have a baseball team, Ben Fry will let you answer that question. He has created a tool for visualizing the salary of Major League Baseball teams versus their performance in 2007 (prev. As he explains:
This sketch looks at all 30 Major League Baseball Teams and ranks them on the left according to their day-to-day standings. The lines connect each team to their 2007 salary, listed on the right. Drag the date at the top to move through the season. The first ten days of the season are ommitted because the rankings to (at least) that point are statistically silly. You can also use the arrow keys on the keyboard to move forward or backward one day. A steep blue line means that the team is doing well for its money, which reflects well on the team's General Manager. A steep red line implies that the team is throwing away money. The thickness of the line is proportional to the team's salary relative to the others.
This sketch looks at all 30 Major League Baseball Teams and ranks them on the left according to their day-to-day standings. The lines connect each team to their 2007 salary, listed on the right.
Drag the date at the top to move through the season. The first ten days of the season are ommitted because the rankings to (at least) that point are statistically silly. You can also use the arrow keys on the keyboard to move forward or backward one day.
A steep blue line means that the team is doing well for its money, which reflects well on the team's General Manager. A steep red line implies that the team is throwing away money. The thickness of the line is proportional to the team's salary relative to the others.
The images above are captures of the beginning of the season rankings (left) as compared to now (right). It looks like Boston is now at a break-even point whereas the Yankees are sinking and a bit over-paid. I wonder if any of the GM compensation decisions are made based on this tool.
We realize there is a robust handful of very good infographic reporters and designers working out there for many different publications, but the gang at the NY Times just keeps on keepin' on with innovative — and 98 percent of the time — highly informative infographics and visual displays of data. Today's (25 Feb 2007) edition is a basket rich with fine examples:
* “Truck Sales Slip, Tripping Up Chrysler” (Business Section, p. 8). Offers up a complex (they often are) “treemap” of vehicle sales.
* “Who Do You Think We Are?” (Week in Review – Op-Art, p. 15). Ben Schott, author of “Schott’s Original Miscellany” and “Schott’s Almanac 2007,” a yearbook of American society.” presents some basic line and bar charts, but on subjects of interest to AJ readers. Specifically, “Confidence in Institutions” (the “press” is the lowest, even below Congress) and “Newspaper Readership.” (And you already know what that graph looks like.)
*) “How Two Rights Can Make a Wrong” (Week in Review – p. 5). Howard Markel, M.D. and Bill Marsh give us a fine graphic illustrating complex drug interactions.
Juan C. Dürsteler, in Barcelona, Spain, edits a fine online magazine devoted to information graphics. The current issue describes “… the diagram for the process of Information Visualisation as seen by Yuri Engelhardt and the author after a series of discussions about its nature and the process that leads from Data to Understanding.”
And it is available in English and Spanish. Check out http://www.infovis.net/printMag.php?num=187&lang=2
Pardon the expression, but there seems to be a real “surge” in infographics and visual statistics news in recent days. This post on Tim O'Reilly blog (an increasingly informative site, I find) points us to some interesting tools out of the IBM shop. Be sure to check out the site for “Many Eyes.” Impressive, and highly informative visualization of useful data.
By Tim O'Reilly
IBM today announced Many Eyes, a site for sharing and commenting on visualizations. Martin Wattenberg, who developed the original version of the treemap we use for our book market visualizations as well as the awesome baby name voyager, and Fernanda Viegas, who worked with him on the equally awesome history flow visualizations of Wikipedia, are the geniuses behind this project.
As with swivel, users can upload any data set, but the tools for visualizing and graphing the data are much richer. The visualization options include US and World maps, line graphs, stack graphs, bar charts, block histograms, bubble diagrams, scatter plots, network diagrams, pie charts, and treemaps. The site isn't yet live, but should be very shortly. Meanwhile, you can get a good sense of the types of graphs available by checking out the visualization gallery.
I asked Martin and Fernanda how they compared themselves to swivel, and Fernanda replied:
You also asked if we see our site as “Swivel for visualization”. That phrase isn't quite accurate (any more than Swivel is “Many Eyes for data” ;-). Both our site and Swivel are examples of a broader phenomenon, which we call “social data analysis,” where playful, social exploration of data leads to serious analysis. At the same time the two sites fall on different ends of a spectrum. Swivel seems to have some neat data mining technology that finds correlations automatically. By contrast, we've placed our emphasis on the power of human visual intelligence to find patterns. My guess is that both approaches will be successful because social data analysis is a powerful idea.
Martin added:
In Many Eyes our goal is to “democratize” visualization by offering it as a simple service. We also think that there's something special about visualizations that gets people talking, so we placed a big emphasis in design and technology to let people have conversations around the visualizations.
Personally, I'd love to see swivel and manyeyes working together, as swivel already has some great data sets, but has only a limited number of graphing tools. But that's an exercise for the future. For now, data wonks can just rejoice that both sites exist, and should start exploring, and as Martin says, conversing about what they find. I love both of these sites.
Thanks to our friend at the University de Zulia in Maracaibo, Prof. Maria-Isabel Neuman, we just learned about this Rosetta Stone of data visualization. This is a must-see: “A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods.”http://www.visual-literacy.org/pages/documents.htm These guys in Switzerland at the Visual-Literacy Project have pulled together, in a wonderfully coherent fashion, the multiple concepts that many of us have been working on for years. Be sure to also take a look at the paper by Lengler and Eppler at the bottom of the “Maps” page. It's a good, tight explanation of what they are up to. We like their definition:
But we're not so sure that “permanent” is crucial or should even be included. If they are referring to “method,” then that would seem to limit the opportunity for refinements over time. And if they are talking about the resulting displays of data, might not that reduce the possibility of dynamic data displays, say real-time traffic flows or changes in the stock market? Simulations? Oh, well, a refinement ripe for discussion.
Yes, we do believe in borrowing good ideas. In this case, we are suggesting that designers of infographics “borrow” from cartographers in carefully picking colors that do more than just brighten the page.See Cynthia Brewer's work at http://www.personal.psu.edu/cab38/ColorSch/SchHome.html
The scheme guidelines are limited to the use of color to directly represent data that occur at locations in the graphic where colors occur. The types of thematic maps to which these guidelines apply are choropleth maps (for example, census tracts filled with colors representing the percentage of the population from an ethnic group), filled isoline maps (for example, color bands that mark set ranges of terrain elevation), and qualitative areal-extent maps (for example, different colors for different types of vegetation). My hope is that these guidelines and the associated terminology will also guide the work of people grappling with data visualization challenges in diverse disciplines such as physics, medicine, psychology, and graphic arts.
A disorderly jumble of colors produces a map that is little more than a spatially arranged look-up table. The goal of this WWW resource is to help you do better than that by using color with skill. This resource provides a generalized set of color schemes and example maps.
Finding a cheap library of maps with consistent style isn't always easy, especially if those maps have to work on the Web, in print and/or PowerPoint presentations. Today Directions Magazine points us to such sets (usually priced for less than $50) that meets those criteria. See “Trumpet Marketing Group, LLC Announces Collection of Royalty-Free United States Presentation Maps“
Says the company:
PresentationMall.com US State Maps are provided in a number of formats, including Adobe� Illustrator(.AI), Windows Meta File (WMF), JPG and GIF.
Adobe Illustrator files (.ai) are layered, vector format files and are fully editable. This means you can add your own elements to the maps change borders, separate counties, change colors, show or hide layers and more. You can resize the images without losing quality. Additionally, county names are provided on a different layer, so they can be manipulated as needed.
The WMF files (.wmf) can be imported into popular applications such as Microsoft PowerPoint� and Office� and edited for presentations, reports, demonstrations and more!
No story? Then check out Swivel, a web site rich with data — and the display of data — that you didn't know about and which is pregnant with possibilities for a good news feature. And often a news feature that could be localized.Here, for example, is a posting from the SECRECY REPORT CARD 2005 illustrating the changing trends in the the classification and de-classification of U.S. government data. (You can probably guess the direction of the curves.)
The number of classified documents is steadily increasing, while the number of pages being declassified is dwindling. This data were uploaded by mcroydon.
