Le portail francophone de la géomatique

It’s been a month since Barend Gehrels launched blog dedicated to development of Boost.Geometry library which is also known of its former name as Generic Geometry Library or shortly GGL.

Here I go we a bit delayed announcement: [barendgehrels.blogspot.com]

It’s been a month since Barend Gehrels launched blog dedicated to development of Boost.Geometry library which is also known of its former name as Generic Geometry Library or shortly GGL.

Here I go we a bit delayed announcement: [barendgehrels.blogspot.com]

Spatial Turns are sort of geographic expressways that channel geography to highway ramps with different space awareness. I finished reviewing the book A Spatial Turn — interdiscplinary perspectives last night. I started reading it and simply kept on reading it until I finished. Edited by Barney Warf and Santa Arias the book includes some interesting insights. [...]

Martin Isenburg has developed a lossless data compressor for LAS.

1. Medical researchers at UCI’s Beckman Laser Scanning Institute have developed optical, metabolic signatures for malignant breast cancer tumors.
2. Traditional mammography often misses tumors in dense tissue.
3. Young women with tumors are often mis-diagnosed.

Medical researchers at UC Irvine’s Beckman Laser Scanning Institute believe they have developed optical, metabolic signatures for malignant breast tumors. As my wife just finished a 5 year treatment for a pre-cancerous tissue this was all too familiar a discussion.

The researchers believe that the potential is there to identify breast tumors in dense tissue that are often not identified with traditional mammography. In certain cases contrast agents are needed and even then can be problematic in diagnosing tumors in young women where if present are particularly aggressive.

The technique can also be used during treatment to measure the effectiveness of the procedures. A larger research test suite is being planned.

There’s a nice feature in today’s New York Times that outlines the use of open mapping tools to deal with a crisis. The focus is on Ushahidi, with the title, “Africa’s Gift to Silicon Valley: How to Track a Crisis”. “This kind of everyone-as-informant mapping is shaking up the world, bringing the Wikipedia revolution [...]

Winners of the Eurovision Contest 1956-2009What do 'Boom Bang-a-Bang', 'La, la, la', 'Ding-A-Dong', 'A-Ba-Ni-Bi' and 'Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley' have in common?Well, they just happen to be some of the most inspired lyrics to ever come out of Europe. That's right each of these songs is a past winner of the Eurovision Song Contest.Thanks to microformats.dk you can now watch a video of every winning song

Researchers from Stanford and the University of California, Riverside are working to harness the power of accelerometers to build a seismic detecting network out of ordinary computers. Accelerometers detect movement and are increasingly being used in devices such as iPhones to flip from vertical to horizontal and Wii controllers. Many of today’s laptop computers [...]

For those interested in some of the current thinking on LiDAR data compression Michael Rosen from LizardTech has posted an excellent summary of the recent ILMF presentations.

The USGS released two satellite maps of the post-earthquake situation in Port-au-Prince last week: one in infrared, one in natural colour. Each is a 200-megabyte PDF. The maps are based on imagery we saw in raw form shortly after the quake; it's since been "geo-corrected, mosaicked, and reproduced onto...

In this map from Wikimedia Commons (reproduced here under its Creative Commons Licence), blue areas use daylight saving time, orange areas no longer use it, red areas never have....

An interview with Google engineer Scott Shawcroft about Google Maps's new bike directions; the audio is about five minutes long....

A large collection of official metro maps of cities around the world collected by Webdesigner Depot; it's interesting to see which maps use a Beck-style diagram and which ones are more geographical. Via Jennifer. Buy Transit Maps of the World at Amazon.com...

Twitter@SxSWA couple of days ago Twitter added the option to view a Google Map of geo-tagged Tweets. Now, in Twitter, if you see a small blue map marker beneath a Tweet you can hover over it with your mouse and see where the message was sent from.The map markers, at the moment, only appear next to Tweets sent from mobile phones and from people who have opted to share their location in their

The Northern Ireland Environment Agency (NIEA) has developed a web portal for mapping products.  The Historic site includes various information about archaeology, defense, industry, monuments, listed buildings, lands and topography.  There is a wealth of information on the website. The River Basin Plan Interactive Map provides details about water and hydrology. Administrative districts, management areas, catchments [...]

Sismicamente.comThis Google Maps mashup is designed as a useful tool for civil engineers in Italy. The map shows seismic hazards in Italy and the spectra response of seismic action.Using the search form it is possible to find the spectrum of response and seismic hazard curves of each Italian municipality. When the map is zoomed in the circle map markers will reveal the spectra response at that

ViaMichelin vient de lancer ViaMichelin Voyage : un site dédié au tourisme afin de préparer votre voyage sur mesure. Plus de 7000 destinations dans le monde, sites touristiques, restaurants et hôtels sont proposés.

En collaboration avec les célèbres « Guide Vert » Michelin, ViaMichelin Voyage est un véritable guide numérique référençant l’ensemble des destinations touristiques à travers le monde. Proposant un contenu riche, ViaMichelin Voyage vous permet de naviguer à travers des fiches descriptives sur des lieux ou des monument très complète mais aussi des circuits touristiques, préparé

Beaucoup de texte et peu d’images ou d’illustration malheureusement… on peut s’y perdre parfois. Mais le mérite est d’avoir une information exhaustive pour ses prochaines vacances!

A quand une version mobile?

En complément de mon article précédent, vous pouvez jeter un œil ici. Vous y trouverez une présentation fort intéressante (faite par l’auteur de YQL Geo Library) de la problématique de géolocalisation.

I was in the Gold Coast last week listening to the map daddy talk about GeoDesign.  I’m not alone in my doubts on this one  - to be honest it sounds like the ‘new and improved’ badge  I find on my washing powder. Anyway the other rather surprising thing I heard in JD’s plenary was about the ‘emergence of‘  VGI!  This was mentioned within the context of the immanent changes and developments in ArcGIS Online. Don’t get me wrong I think ArcGIS Online looks great but come on………….. you can’t speak at a GIS conference about crowd sourcing and not tip your hat to OSM – can you?

Well not if you’re the the real daddy. How many examples are given here where a map is NOT used….

I’m reading Darren’s post about The Geography of Tim Hortons. It’s interesting. It’s fun. The geospatial-enabled fast food consumption seems to be well aligned with the recent prophecies about what’s lucrative now, apart from donuts. It could be interesting to compare the Hortons’ trend with country-level version of this map. Perhaps, ST_Overlaps would return false, but ST_Intersection would likely return a pretty large geometry.

Anxiously, however, my enthusiasm is being a little bit repressed. The idea is a double edged sword and instead of navigating ourselves straight to donut heavens, we should rather start hiding such dangerous places from all publicly available maps and guides. This could be a part of health promoting geocaching campaign “Burn to Find”.

And I’m not going to put any smiles in here.

Direct costs are estimated to be £4.2 billion and Foresight have forcasted that this will more than double by 2050 if we continue as we are. — UK DoH report.

La belle et douce France peut pavoiser sur son génie urbain, ses villes incomparables qui battraient des records de fréquentation touristique. Qu'elle est moche, cette France des villes et des banlieues ceinturées par d'horribles paysages « vérolés par la pub ». Yvan Grandis, auteur de cette métaphore médicale, membre des Déboulonneurs vient d'être convoqué devant les tribunaux pour avoir grafitté des pubs sur « la plus belle avenue du monde » (à Paris, forcément).
Une Chantal Jouanno bien peu martiale
Pourtant, (...)

The Indian Premier League 2010 cricket season began yesterday. This is the third season of the IPL and in just three short years it has become one of the most watched sports competitions in the world.IPL Twitter MapThis map shows Tweets tagged #ipl. The map animates through the latest messages posted to Twitter about the Indian Premier League.To keep up with all the latest discussion about the

Great article on the tricks employed in creating today’s best racing games. To date they have been relying on digital photography to capture the track details and conditions, but they say laser scanning is next. This is BIG business.

Frédéric Duhart, De confits en foies gras. Une histoire des oies et des canards du Sud-Ouest, Bayonne/Donostia, Ed. Elkar, 2009
A-t-on encore besoin du jeu de l'oie pour comprendre le monde, ainsi qu'on le pensait à la cour des Médicis de Florence au 16e siècle ? Sans doute pas, mais annonçant le danger, les oies avaient acquis l'oreille de notre civilisation (la racine du mot a donné « ouïr » et « oreille ») jusqu'à ce que les médias s'emparent du sujet. Frédéric Duhart, anthropologue - annonçant depuis (...)

Frédéric Duhart, De confits en foies gras. Une histoire des oies et des canards du Sud-Ouest, Bayonne/Donostia, Ed. Elkar, 2009
A-t-on encore besoin de cette curieuse géographie du jeu de l'oie pour comprendre le monde, ainsi qu'on le pensait à la cour des Médicis de Florence au 16e siècle ? Sans doute pas, mais annonçant le danger, les oies avaient acquis l'oreille de notre civilisation (la racine du mot a donné « ouïr » et « oreille ») jusqu'à ce que les médias s'emparent du sujet. Frédéric Duhart, (...)

Luc-Henri Fage et Jean-Michel Chazine, Bornéo, la mémoire des grottes, Fage Editions, 2009
Bornéo, la mémoire des grottes commence comme un compte rendu d'expédition des temps héroïques (L.-H. Fage n'est-il pas parti en 1988 sur les traces d'A. W. Nieuwenhuis qui avait traversé l'île de Bornéo à la fin du XIXe siècle ?) et se termine sur un apport majeur dans le domaine de l'anthropologie. Toute l'histoire du peuplement de l'Indonésie va s'en trouver réinterprétée. Sur un siècle, ce ne sont pas moins de treize expéditions (...)

Luc-Henri Fage et Jean-Michel Chazine, Bornéo, la mémoire des grottes, Fage Editions, 2009
Bornéo, la mémoire des grottes commence comme un compte rendu d'expédition des temps héroïques (L.-H. Fage n'est-il pas parti en 1988 sur les traces d'A. W. Nieuwenhuis qui avait traversé l'île de Bornéo à la fin du XIXe siècle ?) et se termine sur un apport majeur dans le domaine de l'anthropologie. Toute l'histoire du peuplement de l'Indonésie va s'en trouver réinterprétée. Sur un siècle, ce ne sont pas moins de treize expéditions (...)

MezzomanMezzoman, the Google Maps mashup that helps you to find places to meet friends and / or business associates has a fresh new design and a new way to calculate your meeting point.Mezzoman's new algorithm follows roads and avoids water and other places you probably wouldn't want to meet and can work out the optimum meeting point for three people. To use Mezzoman just enter two or three

Grand Palais : 24 février 2010 - 24 mai 2010
William Turner (1775-1851) est considéré comme le plus grand peintre anglais de paysages au XIXe siècle. Il a trempé ses doigts dans la peinture dès sa prime enfance. A 14 ans, consécration peu commune, il devient élève à la Royal Academy. En 1802, il est élu membre de cette académie, en 1809 il y est nommé professeur de perspective, et en 1845, à l'apogée de sa carrière, il en devient le président (intérimaire).Célèbre et riche en son temps, il n'hésite pas à créer dans sa demeure (...)

Le 6 deye 1388
Nous sommes le dimanche 27 décembre 2009 (en calendrier grégorien) et le 6 deye 1388, soit le deuxième jour de la semaine, dans le calendrier iranien, et qui est habituellement un jour de travail. Mais c'est aujourd'hui l'achoura, le deuxième jour consécutif des commémorations en souvenir de Hussein, le troisième imam du chiisme, défait par l'armée du calife à Kerbala et mort de soif dans le désert en 680. Des défilés officiels sont prévus dans la ville. Comme bien évidemment toute manifestation contre (...)

De l'insularité de l'esprit humain à celle du monde
Année 1954, au large de Boston. Prenez une île abritant un hôpital psychiatrique pour meurtriers psychopathes, faites s'évanouir dans des conditions tout à fait inexplicables l'une des patientes, glissez un petit papier avec un code bizarre sous le lit de la disparue, ajoutez une tempête qui isole temporairement cette même île quelques heures après l'arrivée des deux marshals chargés de l'enquête, et vous avez les ingrédients de l'excellent polar de Dennis Lehane, (...)

Parcourir tous les documents ArcMap d'un arborescence de votre disque, inventorier les couches qu'ils contiennent et signaler les sources de données manquantes, c'est ce que propose l'outil ArcCrawler. Développé par Eric O'Neal et publié sur ArcScript, ArcCrawler permet de construire rapidement un rapport détaillé du contenu et de la santé de vos MXD.  Le setup installe une nouvelle barre

YQL Geo Library est une bibliothèque JavaScript exploitant les capacités de YQL ainsi que d’autres technologies pour apporter des capacités de géolocalisation à vos applications web.

Via Slashgeo et WebResourcesDepot.

• Geo Social Location Checkin to Twitter from iPhone apps
  
  With the cool SXSW event taking place this week in Austin, TX, everyone who's anyone in social and social location seems to have rolled out updates this week including yelp, foursquare, gowalla, Tweetsii and more

For all you students out there whose maps are greeted with a “That’s bizarre…”, I’ve got the perfect map challenge for you! Our reader Keith M. sent us a heads up about the Bizarre Map Challenge, a map design competition open to high school, college, and university students (only here in the US). The maps submitted by students are supposed to be “bizarre” in the sense of being out of the ordinary but still using real-world data, so thinking outside the box will pay off!

The deadline to submit your map is March 22nd, and you can find complete contest rules here

First Prize is $5000 and the top ten will all get cash prizes, so start designing those maps!

.

Back in the day, when OpenStreetMap was a mere babe-in-arms, the poster child for the geo-industry response to Hurricane Katrina was Google, and more specifically Google Earth.

This was true to such an extent that – showing what was, under the circumstances, a stunning lack of perspective – parts of the NASA WorldWind community bemoaned the fact that the Google Earth team got all the credit, when they had done just as much, perhaps even more, to help the disaster response.

Contrast this to the recent efforts in response to the devastating earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. Now, big, powerful, rich as Croesus Google is left trailing in the wake of plucky OpenStreetMap and its dedicated band of volunteers.

ITO World’s video of the Haiti OpenStreetMap highlights just how much data was created in such a short space of time:

OpenStreetMap – Project Haiti from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

Of course, not much of the OpenStreetMap data capture would have been possible without the availability of high resolution imagery from GeoEye, and others, which cannot be guaranteed forever. However, I pity the future GeoEye executive who tries to monopolise, or monetise, the data during a subsequent crisis.

I’m not suggesting that any of the people or organisations were in it for the publicity alone, but there can be no doubt that, with the high profile airings at TED of the OpenStreetMap efforts by none other than Sir Tim Berners-Lee, there has only been one winner this time around.

Here’s the deal… Soon, you will be able to embed our Twitter Maps functionality into your own web site. This means you can be cool by having a Bing Map on your web site, blog, favorite...



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Ce diable de Christopher Niemann illustrateur américain de renom (New York Times, Wired...) vient de nous pondre un fascinant billet intitulé my way sur son blog "Astract City".

Pour vous mettre en appétit voici la recette de l'omelette illustrée par une bretelle d'autoroute :

et un très bon résumé de l'Irak au moins vu de New York :

Au delà de l'humour (de plus en plus indispensable ces temps ci)  Christopher nous rappelle que la cartographie de l'information s'est emparée dès le début avec profit de sa cousine géographique (voir la Carte de Tendre entre autres).

Les plans de métro et les tables périodiques c'est très bien mais n'hésitons pas à réinvestir également les cartes pseudo géographiques.

Cela permettra de mettre en évidence que la vision de la réalité ne doit pas se limiter aux Googles maps (et similaires). Tout n'est redevable d'une localisation géographique et ce type de représentation euclidienne ne donne qu'une représentation bien édulcorée de la complexité de notre monde.

 

Source : VizThink

 

The concept of GeoDesign involves a more interactive interface to geospatial layers with the means for sketching and design upon those layers in a collaborative way while contributing and interacting with an evolving intelligent model. The concept itself isn’t new, but various technology pieces have been missing, and the enabling software is now being worked [...]

Here's your weekly dose of geonews in batch mode.



On the FOSS4G and open data front, there's a followup entry reviewing more open source geocoders (initial story). via the OGD blog I found an interesting entry on the failures of Edmonton and Vancouver open data efforts: "[...] two minor mistakes that are preventing the Edmontorcouver opendata initiative from being a tremendous success [...] 1. They expected a new community to build itself. 2. They wrote their own license." GeoServer new supports ImagePyramid imports. There's also a long article about creating interactive charts with Geopublisher 1.4. There's also a short entry on displaying two different graticules in QGIS. Here's a site that let's you overlay OpenStreetMap data transparently On Google/Yahoo Maps.



In the everything-else category, Slashdot discussed a story named about a new phone to track employees movements and a discussion on augmented reality. Here's an entry named Geotag Photos with an Android Phone and Any Digital Camera. Via O'Reilly, here's an entry on Twitter's location policy. You can also embed Bing Maps Twitter Maps on your website. Geolocation is also coming to Facebook next month. In fact, MapQuest has a new feature to share MapQuest maps woth Facebook friends. The Canadian RADARSAT Constellation got confirmed funding in the recently announced federal budget. Using GPS sensors, it seems the Chilean earthquake moved the City of Conception 10 feet to the west. In addition to the Google geonews shared this morning, here's Fredericton, Canada in 3D and Bloemfontein, Port Elizabeth and Pretoria in South Africa and Mulhouse in France also in 3D.

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

Here's your weekly dose of geonews in batch mode.

On the FOSS4G and open data front, there's a followup entry reviewing more open source geocoders (initial story). via the OGD blog I found an interesting entry on the failures of Edmonton and Vancouver open data efforts: "[...] two minor mistakes that are preventing the Edmontorcouver opendata initiative from being a tremendous success [...] 1. They expected a new community to build itself. 2. They wrote their own license." GeoServer new supports ImagePyramid imports. There's also a long article about creating interactive charts with Geopublisher 1.4. There's also a short entry on displaying two different graticules in QGIS. Here's a site that let's you overlay OpenStreetMap data transparently On Google/Yahoo Maps.

In the everything-else category, Slashdot discussed a story named about a new phone to track employees movements and a discussion on augmented reality. Here's an entry named Geotag Photos with an Android Phone and Any Digital Camera. Via O'Reilly, here's an entry on Twitter's location policy. You can also embed Bing Maps Twitter Maps on your website. Geolocation is also coming to Facebook next month. In fact, MapQuest has a new feature to share MapQuest maps woth Facebook friends. The Canadian RADARSAT Constellation got confirmed funding in the recently announced federal budget. Using GPS sensors, it seems the Chilean earthquake moved the City of Conception 10 feet to the west. In addition to the Google geonews shared this morning, here's Fredericton, Canada in 3D and Bloemfontein, Port Elizabeth and Pretoria in South Africa and Mulhouse in France also in 3D.

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

I am quite amazed at how rapidly OSGEO continues to grow.  The total number of projects is now over 20, eight of which are in incubation.  Among the major project additions are PostGIS, GeoServer and MapFish. 

There are about two dozen chapters around the world including India, US, UK, Canada, Japan, Korea, Poland, France, China and Italy. 

The Ordnance Survey of the UK has just become a Supporting Sponsor. Autodesk, INPE and Ingres are also Supporting Sponsors.

The total lines of code for all OSGEO projects is now over 12 million.  The total number of committers has reached 635, of which 298 or almost half have been active in the past 12 months.  For comparison, the last time I looked over two years ago Apache had about a thousand committers.

I am quite amazed at how rapidly OSGEO continues to grow.  The total number of projects is now over 20, eight of which are in incubation.  Among the major project additions are PostGIS, GeoServer and MapFish. 

There are about two dozen chapters around the world including India, US, UK, Canada, Japan, Korea, Poland, France, China and Italy. 

The Ordnance Survey of the UK has just become a Supporting Sponsor. Autodesk, INPE and Ingres are also Supporting Sponsors.

The total lines of code for all OSGEO projects is now over 12 million.  The total number of committers has reached 635, of which 298 or almost half have been active in the past 12 months.  For comparison, the last time I looked over two years ago Apache had about a thousand committers.

Débat, "Les Balkans dans l'Europe" avec Michel Sivignon, le vendredi 12 mars à 20 h au Creham, Parc d'Avroy à Liège.
"Du point de vue de la géographie, les Balkans sont incontestablement une région de l'Europe. Mais historiquement, la plus grande partie des Balkans a fait partie de l'Empire Ottoman, un Etat qui n'appartient pas culturellement à l'Europe, pendant plus de trois siècles. Toute l'histoire des Balkans depuis deux siècles est celle de leur réintégration dans le concert des nations européennes. (...)

• La démarche d'intégration du #geomarketing :: voyez notre présentation sur @slideshare [bit.ly] #
• Une nouvelle approche des zones de chalandise [bit.ly] #
• La Business Intelligence, un atout technologique pour les départements marketing des entreprises de l’agroalimentaire [bit.ly] #
• RT @dancommator: Building Customer Loyalty with a GPS Tracking System #GPS #geotargetting #geomarketing [bit.ly] #

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[StreetView] L'Angleterre sous tous les angles

Débat le vendredi 12 mars 2010, au Lieu Unique dans le cadre du festival Sonor, 18 h à 19 h30 : " Le paysage sonore, une géographie émergente ". Claire Guiu est géographe multiculturelle, maître de conférences à l'Université de Nantes. Ses travaux portent sur la construction culturelle des territoires (patrimonialisation, ruralités, développement local et idéologie territoriale) et sur les géographies des festivals, des musiques et des sons. Elle a coordonné différentes publications (Géographie et culture, 2006, La (...)

До недавнего времени использование растров с привязкой OZI Explorer представляло определенные проблемы. Приходилось использовать сторонние продукты, например GlobalMapper.

Все изменилось с выходом GDAL/OGR 1.7.1, в котором появилась поддержка MAP-файлов OZI. Логично было бы предположить, что скоро с такими файлами можно будет работать и в QGIS. К сожалению, QGIS пока собирается со старой версией GDAL – 1.6.3, и соответственно не может работать с такими файлами. На помощь приходит расширение GDALTools, которое вызывает утилиты GDAL напрямую.

Чтобы все работало, необходимо сделать следующее:

1. При помощи установщика OSGeo4W устанавливаем пакет gdal-dev.

2. Открываем в любом текстовом редакторе файл C:\OSGe04W\bin\qgis-dev.bat и исправляем пятую строку.

Было:

call «%OSGEO4W_ROOT%»\bin\gdal16.bat

Стало:

call «%OSGEO4W_ROOT%»\bin\gdaldev.bat

Сохраняем изменения и все. Теперь GdalTools будет использовать последнюю версию библиотек GDAL/OGR, и можно не покидая QGIS просматривать информацию по растрам с озиевской привязкой, конвертировать их в какой-то более правильный формат вроде GeoTiff без использования сторонних утилит, и вообще делать с ними все, что умеет GDALTools.

Например, чтобы конвертировать GIF файл с привязкой OZI в формат GeoTiff нужно:

• запустим QGIS, используя наш модифицированный bat-файл
• в меню «Растр» выберем «Конвертация»
• в поле «Исходный слой» укажем путь к файлу с привязкой в виде файла MAP, а в поле «Целевой файл» укажем расположение итогового файла. В выпадающем списке выберем необходимый формат результата (GeoTIFF).
• Задаем систему координат растра с помощью инструмента «Добавить проекцию».
• нажимаем кнопку «OK»

В результате таких действий получим готовый к использованию GeoTiff со всей необходимой информацией.

Следует помнить, что при обновлении пакета qgis-dev модифицированный bat-файл будет вновь заменен на «стандартный», так что позаботьтесь о резервной копии и не забывайте выполнять замену после обновления. И само собой, когда QGIS будет скомпилирован с GDAL 1.7.1 такие манипуляции будут больше не нужны.

The photo sharing site Flickr is hosting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Documerica Project from the 1970s. The project ran from 1971-1977, with freelance photographers hired to take images related to environmental problems. There are more than 15,000 photos archived on the site. Read more related Spatial Sustain posts:Google Unveils Forest Monitoring ApplicationUSGS Director Promotes the [...]

Firefox: WMS-inspector, nouvelle extension expérimentale pour traiter les services WMS

The U.S. State Department launched a new data visualization site called Opinion Space yesterday. The online data visualization tool gives you the means to gauge how your own opinions stack up to those of others around the world. The visualization isn’t aligned to geographic space, but instead maps opinion space by showcasing the consensus and [...]

From the ERDAS website : "ERDAS has created a Chile Relief Website and web service enabled geospatial datasets free of charge for all organizations participating in the relief efforts to the Chile earthquake and tsunami disasters. 

The following website has been updated to contain a Chile Relief Map context to provide a web map interface to the Chile Web Services:

[apollopro.erdas.com] "

Visit the site to see a list of all the data.

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

Welcome to the Friday’s Food for Thought post from got geoint? As always, we hope that you all had a productive work week and are ready to coast into the weekend. Earlier this week, we covered a story about DARPA’s “Transparent Underground,” and how Geospatial Corporation has actually been doing the whole underground mapping thing since 2005. So, we wanted to take the concept of “underground” and take it to the next level. For example, why are underground bands soo much cooler than mainstream ones? Why do underground artists and designers seem to have more cred? And, are there any cool underground GEOINT trends happening right now? Well, we try our best to answer these questions in this week’s FFT post. And, be sure to check out the funny video at the end of this post.

Underground GEOINT: Where 2.0 Conference

So, where is all the GEOINT underground action happening? We recommend that you all check out the O’Reilly Where 2.0 Conference later this month is San Jose. This conference has been instrumental in showcasing some of the latest and greatest (dare we say underground) GEOINT products and services that will shape the future of location-based technologies. Also, we heard from the Where 2.0 planners that they still have space available for any start ups looking to make a splash. Perhaps you are the underground sensation and you need a platform to go mainstream? Well, Where 2.0 is the place to be!

Pitchfork Media: Purveyors of Underground/Indie Music with a Snobby Twist

So, perhaps you have a teenage son who is developing into a true indie music snob. No matter what music you bring up to him, you are just not cool enough. Or perhaps you have that neighbor who went to one Death Cab for Cutie concert and thinks he is an underground/indie music aficionado? Well, fret no more. You too can become an instant underground music snob by simply reading Pitchfork.com. For several years, now Pitchfork has been the purveyor of indie music, and they do not hold back on the snobbery. Some of their reviews can be downright vicious, yet strangely funny at the same time. Check them out the site here and tap into your inner music snob.

Underground Technologies

Did you know that there is a company called Underground Technologies? Neither did we. Located in Troy Michigan, Underground Technologies was incorporated in late 2004 and released product in 2007. Using its background in foam and polyurea composites, UGT thought out of the box to develop a manhole elevation ring that can withstand the enviroment while tackling the current problems. UGT tested for 2 full years before releasing product. UGT’s Product line consist of elevation rings, securing and sealing as well as providing an outer barrier to eliminate INI. Check out their web site here.

Gopher: Underground Technology

Back in 1992, when “yahoo” was something cowboys yelled and “ebay” was just pig Latin, the University of Minnesota developed a new way of looking at data on the Internet. Their protocol, called “gopher” after the UMN mascot, allowed archivists to present the mishmash of information in a standard format, and enabled readers to navigate documents on a world of servers using a simple visual interface. For a while, it seemed as if gopher might open the Internet up to the nontechnical masses and usher in a new era of online communication. It very well might have, if the Web hadn’t come along and done it instead. Read the full Wired article here.



Digital Underground – The Humpty Dance

So here comes the funny music video tie in…remember the rap one-hit wonders the Digital Underground? Well fans of late 80s silly rap in the vein of Kid n’ Play will certainly enjoy the Digital Underground’s classic video “The Humpty Dance.” Here it is for your listening pleasure. Caveat: don’t mention this song when you are trying to impress your neighbor or indie music oriented teenager. You will lose all underground cred. Enjoy.

Un petit blog en français pour annoncer quelques nouvelles applications MapFish.

- 3 sites communaux: [genolier.geocommunes.ch] , [trelex.geocommunes.ch] et [coppet.geocommunes.ch]


- Un projet pilote à Genève pour la gestion des arbres: [c2cpc72.camptocamp.com] .

- Une première version du projet Geobretagne, une IDS complétement OGC: [c2cpc83.camptocamp.com]

- Et la nouvelle version de l'API de SuisseMobile qui a été déjà instanciée 1200 fois !

Google permet de suivre les élections régionales 2010 depuis Google Maps, avec une carte présentant les résultats de 2004, les tendances de 2010 et bien sûr les résultats , bientôt.
Consulter la carte depuis Google Maps

Ce n’est pas une nouvelle version de PostGIS qui est sortie, mais bel et bien deux versions d’un coup !

PostGIS 1.4.2 et PostGIS 1.5.1 viennent en effet de voir le jour.

Que l’on se rassure, ce sont des versions mineures, entendre par là qu’elles ne présentent aucune nouvelle fonctionnalité, mais des corrections de bug et de compatibilité. On notera notamment la mise en conformité annoncée avec PostgreSQL 9.0, pour les geeks qui vivent sur le bleeding edge. N’hésitez donc pas à télécharger et installer ces nouvelles versions.

Corrections effectuées sur la 1.4.2 :

• #327, fix up the uninstall functions (Paul Ramsey)
• #355, build improvements for shp2pgsql-gui (Paul Ramsey)
• #387, add towgs84 arguments for SRID 28992 (Paul Ramsey)
• #409, fix ST_AsSVG with empty geometrycollection input (Olivier Courtin)
• #410, update embedded bbox when applying ST_SetPoint, ST_AddPoint, ST_RemovePoint to a linestring (Paul Ramsey)
• #411, allow dumping tables with invalid geometries (Sandro Santilli – work done for Regione Toscana-SIGTA)
• #421, fix computed string length in ST_AsGML() (Olivier Courtin)
• #441, fix GML generation with heterogeneous collections (Olivier Courtin)

Corrections effectuées sur la 1.5.1 :

• #410, update embedded bbox when applying ST_SetPoint, ST_AddPoint ST_RemovePoint to a linestring (Paul Ramsey)
• #411, allow dumping tables with invalid geometries (Sandro Santilli, for Regione Toscana-SIGTA)
• #414, include geography_columns view when running upgrade scripts (Paul Ramsey)
• #419, allow support for multilinestring in ST_Line_Substring (Paul Ramsey, for Lidwala Consulting Engineers)
• #421, fix computed string length in ST_AsGML() (Olivier Courtin)
• #441, fix GML generation with heterogeneous collections (Olivier Courtin)
• #443, incorrect coordinate reversal in GML 3 generation (Olivier Courtin)
• #450, wrong area calculation for geography features that cross the date line (Paul Ramsey)
• Ensure support for upcoming 9.0 PgSQL release (Paul Ramsey)

With the hip, SXSW event taking place this week in Austin, Texas pretty much every social-location check-in developer has rolled out a new iPhone app this week. For the user/aka. techno geek, needing...



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Google a mis en ligne un nouveau site: Google Public Data Explorer. Ce site de visualisation expérimental permet de sélectionner des données publiques issues de plusieurs organismes comme la Banque mondiale, l'OCDE, Eurostat... On peur choisir différentes thématiques puis différents indicateurs. Le tour de force de ce nouveau service, c'est surtout de permettre la visualisation des données selon 4 modèles: le graphique d'évolution, le diagramme en barre, la carte avec les dalles de Google Maps et les évolutions façon "Gapminder" (puisque Google est propriétaire du site et de la technologie Gapminder).
Plusieurs autres atouts: ces représentations graphiques sont dynamiques et une ligne de temps permet de faire évoluer les données; il est possible de comparer les représentations, le tout pouvant être exporté via un code d'embarquement sur un site .
Parmi les données disponibles: celle de du développement humain, les données 2009 de l'OCDE, le chômage dans le monde et aux USA, la mortalité aux États-Unis, l'éducation en Califormie.
un exemple de données embarquées:

une nouvelle utilisation de Google Maps: éditer son Cv pour chercher du travail. C'est la démarche de Ed Hamilton, qui cherchait un poste de rédacteur à Londres... Et bien, ça marche!
Voici le cv:


View Ed Hamilton - Copywriter. in a larger map

Source: Gizmodo

Pas mal de nouveautés et de mises à jour pour différents produits Google:

• Barcelone est désormais en 3D dans Google earth, ainsi que Mulhouse et trois villes d'Afrique du Sud: Bloemfontein, Port Elizabeth et Pretoria

• Une mise à jour de Google earth avec de nouvelles images du Chili après le tremblement de terre ( à voir à partir de ce fichier KML)
• StreetView est mis à jour avec notamment Hongkong, Macao, des images d'Irlande du Nord, du Japon, des Pays-Bas et deux villes anglaise: Leicester and Leicestershire
• La base de Google Maps a aussi été mise à jour:

View Larger Map

• Google Maps propose des itinéraires pour les cyclistes aux États-Unis:

New FCC GIO Mike Byrne announced an on-line poll/application to test broadband speeds when he spoke at the NSGIC Midyear Conference in Annapolis, Maryland, this week. That application went live on the FCC's Broadband.gov site yesterday.



The application records a tester's location and then runs one of two existing speed-testing tools. The key part for the FCC is the tester's location; they will use the test results, and the geographic locations, as part of their larger task of mapping just what the nation's broadband capacity is, and where that capacity exists.



As a companion story in Wired magazine's Epicenter puts it:

Broadband connection testing isn’t new, and is freely available online, but this might mark the first time that individual tests help to lead to informed policy making.

The FCC has also released mobile apps for iPhone and Android (search for FCC at your App Store) to allow smartphone users to test from where-ever they happen to be.



Michael Terner, of NSGIC sponsor Applied Geographics, tweeted his mobile test results from Boston this morning:

Downloaded FCC's broadband speed test app for Android. My downtown Boston loc doesn't have 3G. .05 mbps DOWN; 2.54 mbps UP. #nsgicmidyear

A lot of recent major Google geonews lately. Google made the announcement of the addition of biking directions in Google Maps: "This route avoids hills (phew!) and puts me on the Burke-Gilman trail for most of the journey. When I need to get off the trail to cross town, biking directions makes sure to keep me on bike-friendly roads and avoid some of the city's busiest intersections. The time estimate for the route is based on a complex set of variables accounting for the type of road, terrain and turns over the course of my ride. [...] When Map Maker is available in the U.S., all riders will be able to directly contribute their local knowledge about trails, bike lanes and suggested routes.". On the Google Lat Long blog, you'll get more information regarding those biking directions: "[...] I can lift the curtain and explain the many factors and variables that we've had to take into account to put this whole feature together [...]". Obviously, offered bike routes are not perfect and will improve over time.



There's an official entry on the major StreetView imagery update. Mapperz shows a map where we learn almost all of U.K. is now available in StreetView. You can now also edit places directly in StreetView. Also adding to integration, there's a new 'Edit this place' capability in Google Maps. There's also Barcelona now in 3D in Google Earth. The GEB offers a nice wrap-up entry named playing games in Google Earth.

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

Google typically releases a city or two with each 3D buildings update, but this week they dropped five on us! The new 3D cities are:

• Barcelona, Spain

• Bloemfontein, South Africa

• Port Elizabeth, South Africa

• Pretoria, South Africa

• Mulhouse, France

Not only is this a larger number of cities, but the quality of some of the buildings is remarkable. For example, look at this building in Mulhouse; the quality of the imagery used on the building is amazing.

At first I thought maybe it was a separate model that was created by hand in SketchUp. However, those buildings are clickable so you can see the details about it, and this one isn't. In fact, much of the city is in this same sharp quality. I then assumed they used StreetView imagery to model the facades, like they did in some California cities late last year. The imagery doesn't quite match up (the StreetView images of the building shows flowers in many of the windows), but that could still be the case. Perhaps they used older StreetView imagery to help create the models? Regardless, they did a superb job and they look great.

The other city you need to take a close look at is Barcelona. The coverage there is quite remarkable as well. You can read about it on the Google Lat Long Blog, or watch this view tour that Google created to help show it off. Enjoy the cities!

Google has posted the story of Fredericton, Canada, and how they became a 3D city in Google Earth.

By using the Cities in 3D program, the City of Fredericton was able to get more than 100 3D buildings added to Google Earth back in January. The building are very well-done and quite detailed, and you can see a fly-through of the city here:

For more information, you can read the full blog entry, visit Google's Cities in 3D page, or fly to Fredericton yourself by using this KML file.

Vicarious.ly, built on SimpleGeo's development platform, collects "check ins" from BlockChalk, Brightkite, Bump Technologies, Flickr, Fwix, Foursquare, Gowalla, and Twitter and puts them on a Google Map. The dots are symbolized by the app they are f...Read more

Vicarious.ly, built on SimpleGeo's development platform, collects "check ins" from BlockChalk, Brightkite, Bump Technologies, Flickr, Fwix, Foursquare, Gowalla, and Twitter and puts them on a Google Map. The dots are symbolized by the app they are f...Read more

When using the Python ‘boto’ library for accessing Amazon Web Services, to enable logging to a file at the ‘debug’ level, simply use the logging module’s configuration:

import logging

logging.basicConfig(filename="boto.log", level=logging.DEBUG)



Place this line near the top of your script, and logging will take place to a file in your current directory called “boto.log”.

I’m sure that this is obvious for most people who use the Python logging module, but this is new code to me, and it took me a fair bit of looking to find out how to enable logging; hopefully other people find it more easily now.

1. From what I can find out Revit is still not point cloud friendly.
2. Small quantities can be imported via DXF or IFC’s, but the workarounds are painful.
3. Autodesk will be releasing there annual product updates in the next month or so. Hopefully Revit will have some kind of point cloud support.

I just did a little on line research to see if things had changed at all, but from what I can see Revit is still not very point cloud friendly. What makes this so difficult to understand is the fact that Revit has become the de facto standard for BIM, and with so much interest in the link between laser scanning and BIM one would think this is fertile ground for product development.

From what I can find it seems that you can import point clouds via DXF or IFC’s, but only in very small quantities or slices, and that people are using multiple software packages to perform each required task. It’s almost “laughable” when you think about it, considering the lost opportunity.

When I spoke with the Revit product managers 18 to 24 months ago about their plans for supporting point clouds the answer was that customers were not requesting it, so it was not a priority. Hopefully there is a secret project underway to change all  of this. The annual Autodesk product releases are due any time. Let’s see if support for point clouds has made the list of new Revit features.

"No one told the GPS satellite about Honesdale’s new one-way traffic pattern." "Attempts to find someone in charge of GPS has not been successful." - Peter Becker noting how local officials in Honesdale, PA are not being successful in finding som...Read more

"No one told the GPS satellite about Honesdale’s new one-way traffic pattern." "Attempts to find someone in charge of GPS has not been successful." - Peter Becker noting how local officials in Honesdale, PA are not being successful in finding som...Read more

The New York Post finds fault with Google Maps's bike directions in New York City. The feature, the Post says, "is filled with potentially fatal flaws, including routes that cut across Central Park's treacherous tranverse roads and steer cyclists to truck-riddled thoroughfares." Google says they're aware of the problems. There's...

Lately a new interesting feature has been added to the GeoServer, the possibility to automagically (yeah, it's not a typo) import raster pyramids created with gdal_retile and serve them as WMS/WCS layers.


Andrea Aime has created a nice tutorial (see here), that should guide you through the basic steps for building a raster pyramid and then ingesting it into GeoServer.

It is worth to point out that, to try this work out, you need to:

1. Use a GeoServer nightly build
2. Install the ImagePyramid extension
3. Install fwtools or build GDAL on your platform of choice.

Enjoy,
Simone.

The White House Blog touts the Federal Highway Administration's ARRA Map which locates and details 12,000 road projects funded by that program. I could not look at the map; it's Silverlight based and crashed Safari. - Whitehouse Blog via Gary Pric...Read more

The White House Blog touts the Federal Highway Administration's ARRA Map which locates and details 12,000 road projects funded by that program. I could not look at the map; it's Silverlight based and crashed Safari. - Whitehouse Blog via Gary Pric...Read more

Same day, same hemisphere - different fortunes:

German news site golem.de reports Navigon MobileNavigator 2.5 for Android is ready for sale at the Android Market (can't find it though). Until May 2 a 30-day-trial for DACH is €50, Europe bites €75.

As free Google Maps Navigation destroyed TomTom and Garmin share prices (yet unclear if and when it will be offered in EMEA), and past the introduction of free turn-by-turn navigation to Nokia's Ovi Maps (yet for only a small share of current phones) - Vodafone's Wayfinder is the first prominent victim:

"We could not charge for something that others gave away for free."

Hard times ahead.

Full story at Engadget and elsewhere.

Several years ago, I took my family with me to the ESRI International User Conference and we spent a lot of time checking things out around San Diego. My son also participated in “GIS Kids Camp” at the UC, where ESRI staff took kids through a few scenarios so they could do some simple analysis, [...]

The developer of Chatroullette is working to restrict sharing of location information. "There is a certain level of anonymity on the Chatroulette that Chatroulette Map takes away, but I plan to add something to my site to allow them to still hide the...Read more

Mallory Peper is GIS specialist at Eden Prairie, Minn.-based Westwood Professional Services. Peper works with Westwood's energy team to provide mapping and analysis for wind, solar and transmission projects. She'll be on the PBS series "SciGirls" ...Read more

There's a new feature on MapQuest to make it simple to share maps, directions and places to your Facebook friends; MapQuest Share to Facebook. - MapQuest Blog For developers: the new platform V6 will be shown off at SXSW. Quick hit of the "wid...Read more

There's a new feature on MapQuest to make it simple to share maps, directions and places to your Facebook friends; MapQuest Share to Facebook. - MapQuest Blog For developers: the new platform V6 will be shown off at SXSW. Quick hit of the "wid...Read more

Mallory Peper is GIS specialist at Eden Prairie, Minn.-based Westwood Professional Services. Peper works with Westwood's energy team to provide mapping and analysis for wind, solar and transmission projects. She'll be on the PBS series "SciGirls" ...Read more

The developer of Chatroullette is working to restrict sharing of location information. "There is a certain level of anonymity on the Chatroulette that Chatroulette Map takes away, but I plan to add something to my site to allow them to still hide the...Read more

Found on Engadget. It demonstrates just how deadly Google can be to the core business of other companies. From their article : "Back in January 2009, as Vodafone was preparing to close a £20 million ($30 million) deal to buy Swedish mapmaker Wayfinder, it was seen as a bold move from a carrier intent on entering the apparently lucrative market for location based services. Fast forward to the present day -- past the bit where free Google Maps Navigation destroyed TomTom and Garmin share prices, and past the introduction of free turn-by-turn navigation to Nokia's Ovi Maps -- and you'll find Wayfinder gently sobbing into a handkerchief as it permanently closes up its doors. Vodafone's Anna Cloke gives us the reason for it with devastating concision:"We could not charge for something that others gave away for free.""

Read more of this story at Slashgeo.

The Geopublisher 1.4 software allows the creation and publication of multimedia atlases. It has been developed for users like scientists, consultants and institutions that want to communicate their research results to the general public. The primary aim is to deliver a software that reduces the technical obstacles in publishing geo-data to a minimum. Your final product will be a user-friendly atlas which can easily be used by people who are not familiar with GIS.

Besides the possibility of publishing maps with custom styles, labels or HTML as already introduced in former blog entries, Geopublisher 1.4 includes a new charting module.

The charting module enables you to create charts based on the attributes of your geo-datasets. These charts are interactively linked with your maps - for example: if you select a point in a scatter plot, the related geo-object will also be selected in your map and the attribute table. Of course this auto-selection works vice-versa, too.

Currently Geopublisher 1.4 supports two different chart types: bar-charts and scatter plots. More types will follow (Note: If you need any other chart type, feel free to contact Wikisquare and order an extension of Geopublisher.).

<!--break-->

About this tutorial

This tutorial will show you how to design bar charts and scatter plots in Geopublisher and how to publish them as a part of you interactive atlas. This tutorial is based on version 1.4 of Geopublisher, which has been officially released as stable on March 10th.

You may join our tutorial session and reproduce all the steps yourself. We offer you to do download the chart demo atlas, which gives you all the data we created the examples with.

Note: As Geopublisher is fully platform independent, you may follow this tutorial on any Windows, Apple or Linux computer.

Download the chart demo atlas and open it in Geopublisher:

Note: You may skip to the next section if you don't want to reproduce the steps shown here.

If you would like to reproduce this tutorial by yourself, you can download a working copy of  the example atlas as a ZIP file. The example atlas contains two datasets and a few predefined charts. It can be used as a starting point to create your own charts. You can also add your own datasets to the atlas and create charts based on them.

Note: A working copy of a Geopublisher atlas is a version that you can open in Geopublisher and edit - like a .doc file in wordprocessing. Once the atlas is exported and delivered to your target group, it can not be changed anymore - like a PDF compared to a .doc file.

1. Get chart demo atlas working copy

Download the chart demo atlas here. Extract the ChartDemoAtlas.zip contents to a local folder, for example to Desktop\ChartDemoAtlas. (If you are a windows user, and you don't know hot to open a ZIP file, get 7zip or consider switching to Ubuntu Linux).

2. Start Geopublisher:

Start Geopublisher 1.4 by clicking the green start button. Some JavaWebStart dialogs will appear and you will be asked to trust the Geopublisher application to let it run on your computer. If starting Geopublisher via JavaWebStart is not working on your system, please select another method from the download page.

3. Open demo atlas:

When Geopublisher has started, open the uncompressed demo atlas by choosing Load an atlas from the File menu (or by pressing F3). Browse to the ChartDemoAtlas folder where you uncompressed the demo atlas and select the atlas.gpa file (Note: .gpa stands for GeoPublisherAtlas).

Geopublisher will open the atlas and you will see the default tripartite overview of the chart demo atlas. We see one layer and one PDF in the datapool; one thematic map in the list of maps and both linked to the menu of the demo atlas. The layer world socio-economic data has been created with Quantum-GIS based on freely availabale data from GeoCommons Finder.

Now double click on the "The digital divide" map in the thematic maps area to open it in Geopublisher's MapComposer (The MapComposer component in Geopublisher allows you to create thematic, interactive and contextualized maps based on the entries in the datapool.). A new window opens and shows an editable view of the map. In the exported atlas, the map would look similar, but with fewer options to manipulate it.

You now see the map "The digital divide". It shows the global distribution of internet bandwidth per capita. Next click the "Legend" tab on the left to access the interactive legend.

Create charts based on global data

In the MapComposer window, you see which layers were used to create your map. The interactive legend always lists all layers, but this map demo map only consists of one layer.

A look at the attributes

Before we start to create charts, let's have a quick look at the attribute table, so that you know what data is available for our tutorial. Click the layer tool menu (ICON) of the world socio-economic data layer and choose attribute table and the attribute table for this layer opens.

The attribute table shows all the attributes that are available for each country. As you can see, out first column contains information on the internet bandwidth available in every country. The third column shows the geographic region the country is part of.

Idea: Let's create a bar chart, that compares the bandwidth availability of the world's regions!

A bar chart comparing regions

With Geopublisher it is easy to create a bar-chart comparing regions and publish it as an interactive part of your atlas. First click the layer tool menu of the world socio-economic data layer and choose Manage charts... .

The chart wizard appears. It will guide you through the basic steps needed to create a chart. In the first step you may choose a chart type. Select bar chart and click Next.

In the second step you may choose the attributes that shall be used for the bar chart. You may use up to four variables (which would create three bars for every region). For our simple example we just choose two attributes: The first attribute defines the categories we want to see bars for. We select the Region attribute. For the second attribute we select the Bandwidth attribute.

In the last step you are asked to enter a title and a description for your chart. This information could be entered in multiple languages, if this atlas was configured to support more than one language, but for our basic example we stick with "just" English.

After you pressed Finish, the chart is created and appears in the list of available charts. Also a chart design dialog will open, that allows to design the layout and appearance of the chart in detail. This first view of the chart we get, is a only a generic proposal. Before we publish the chart to the atlas users, we want to make it more beautiful and "smarter".

At first, enable the Automatic preview checkbox. Now any change will automatically be applied to the preview in the upper part. Unless you have very large or slow (=from the Internet) data, you should always enable the automatic preview.

Configuring axis labelling

In the next step, lets correct the domain axis labelling. The labels are obviously too long and thus the texts overwrite each other. They should be positioned in a different angle. To change the label angle select the domain axis tab.
Moving the slider between 0° and 90° automatically changes the label position in the preview. Tune the slider until you are satisfied with the amount of space the labels take.
Next let's go the bars tab and configure their color. When creating a new chart, the color is selected by random. The bars tab allows you to define the color and other features.

Attribute aggregation

Have you wondered, how the height of these bars is calculated? As you have seen in the attribute table, many countries fall into the same region. Hence their attribute values have to be aggregated using a function you may define in Geopublisher. The following list gives a short explanation of all available aggregation methods in Geopublisher 1.4:

• Count: The value (height) of the bar is the count of countries falling into this category. The actual value of the attribute is ignored.
• Sum: The bar value (height) is equal to the sum of the attribute values of all countries in each category.
• Absolute Sum: The bar value (height) equals the sum of the absolute  attribute value of all countries in a category.
• Average: Calculates the arithmetic average of the attribute values in a category.
• Weighted Average: Calculates the weighted arithmetic average of the attribute values in a category. A second weight attribute has to be selected. See wikipedia for mathematic explanation.
• Median: The bar represents the value (height) of the median value in a category. See wikipedia for mathematic explanation.
• Minimum: The bar represents the value (height) of the smallest value in a category.
• Maximum: The bar represents the value (height) of the biggest value in a category.
• Variance and Standard Deviation: Variance and Standard Deviation are statistical values describing how (in-)homogeneous the values in a category are.

For our example of Internet availability in the world regions we have chosen to select the weighted average aggregation method. How does weighted average aggregation work and when should it be used?

Weighted average attribute aggregation

To explain the difference between weighted and unweighted average, let's image the following table of imaginary values:

Country	Region	Population	Yearly beer consumption [l/per capita]
Germany	A	1000	50
Luxembourg	A	100	100
France	A	1000	20

If unweighted (=normal) average aggregation is selected, the result for region A would be calculated as follows:

mean = ( 1stValue + 2ndValue + 3rdValue ) / number of values
= ( 50 + 100 + 20 ) / 3
= 56,67 l/per capita

This result is not the average beer consumption of region A per capita. The country of Luxembourg is small in comparison to Germany and France and the high beer consumption of its people is overrated in the formula above. To calculate the correct average beer consumption per capita for region A, the population of each country has to be taken into account.

weighted mean = ( 1stValue*1stWeight + 2ndValue*2ndWeight  + 3rdValue*3rdWeight ) / sum of weights
= 50*1000 + 100*100 + 20*1000 / 2100
= 80000 / 2100
= 38,1 l/per capita

The result of the weighted average is the correct yearly beer consumption for all 2100 people in region A. Weighted average should always be used if the attribute values are per capita, per area or have a reference basis in general.

For our example of Internet availability in the world regions, the following settings should be applied in Geopublisher, because the bandwidth attribute data is measured in MBps per capita.

These settings made, you have succsessfully created your first bar chart. Please note, that Geopublisher has automatically created the axis descriptions for you based on meta-data entered for the layer. If you don't like Geopublishers automatic labels, you can always adapt the axis descriptions manually. The resulting bar chart looks like this.

Interactivity between maps and charts

Geopublisher 1.4 has a feature called selection synchronization. It means, that whenever a chart or an attribute table are visible for a map, the user may make selections in each one of them, and Geopublisher automatically synchronizes the selections. For example this allows you to select outlier points in a chart, and see which country/geometry corresponds to this datapoint.

Note: For aggregated bar charts, this functionality is not yet implemented. But for unaggregated bar charts (where one bar corresponds to exactly one geometry) selection synchronization works.

The following two screenshots show the selection synchronization between a scatter plot and a map. In the first image, a selection is made in the scatter plot, and the corresponding countries are highlighted in the map:

The second screenshot shows how a selection is made in the map around South America, and the corresponding data points are highlighted in the chart.

Conclusion

This tutorial showed you how a bar chart based on automatically aggregated attribute values can be created. We did not go into detail about how to create a scatter plot, but the procedure is mainly the same.

Charts are bound to the layer where their data comes from. If a layer is used in multiple maps, Geopublisher allows you to define exactly which charts are available in which maps.

Of course, Geopublisher charts - as all parts of a Geopublisher atlas - can also be translated into multiple languages.

If you have any questions or ideas about the chart functionality, please give us feedback on the AtlasStyler and Geopublisher user mailinglist.

Happy charting!

 

The Geopublisher 1.4 software allows the creation and publication of multimedia atlases. It has been developed for users like scientists, consultants and institutions that want to communicate their research results to the general public. The primary aim is to deliver a software that reduces the technical obstacles in publishing geo-data to a minimum. Your final product will be a user-friendly atlas which can easily be used by people who are not familiar with GIS.

Besides the possibility of publishing maps with custom styles, labels or HTML as already introduced in former blog entries, Geopublisher 1.4 includes a new charting module.

The charting module enables you to create charts based on the attributes of your geo-datasets. These charts are interactively linked with your maps - for example: if you select a point in a scatter plot, the related geo-object will also be selected in your map and the attribute table. Of course this auto-selection works vice-versa, too.

Currently Geopublisher 1.4 supports two different chart types: bar-charts and scatter plots. More types will follow (Note: If you need any other chart type, feel free to contact Wikisquare and order an extension of Geopublisher.).

About this tutorial

This tutorial will show you how to design bar charts and scatter plots in Geopublisher and how to publish them as a part of you interactive atlas. This tutorial is based on version 1.4 of Geopublisher, which has been officially released as stable on March 10th.

You may join our tutorial session and reproduce all the steps yourself. We offer you to do download the chart demo atlas, which gives you all the data we created the examples with.

Note: As Geopublisher is fully platform independent, you may follow this tutorial on any Windows, Apple or Linux computer.

Download the chart demo atlas and open it in Geopublisher:

Note: You may skip to the next section if you don't want to reproduce the steps shown here.

If you would like to reproduce this tutorial by yourself, you can download a working copy of  the example atlas as a ZIP file. The example atlas contains two datasets and a few predefined charts. It can be used as a starting point to create your own charts. You can also add your own datasets to the atlas and create charts based on them.

Note: A working copy of a Geopublisher atlas is a version that you can open in Geopublisher and edit - like a .doc file in wordprocessing. Once the atlas is exported and delivered to your target group, it can not be changed anymore - like a PDF compared to a .doc file.

1. Get chart demo atlas working copy

Download the chart demo atlas here. Extract the ChartDemoAtlas.zip contents to a local folder, for example to Desktop\ChartDemoAtlas. (If you are a windows user, and you don't know hot to open a ZIP file, get 7zip or consider switching to Ubuntu Linux).

2. Start Geopublisher:

Start Geopublisher 1.4 by clicking the green start button. Some JavaWebStart dialogs will appear and you will be asked to trust the Geopublisher application to let it run on your computer. If starting Geopublisher via JavaWebStart is not working on your system, please select another method from the download page.

3. Open demo atlas:

When Geopublisher has started, open the uncompressed demo atlas by choosing Load an atlas from the File menu (or by pressing F3). Browse to the ChartDemoAtlas folder where you uncompressed the demo atlas and select the atlas.gpa file (Note: .gpa stands for GeoPublisherAtlas).

Geopublisher will open the atlas and you will see the default tripartite overview of the chart demo atlas. We see one layer and one PDF in the datapool; one thematic map in the list of maps and both linked to the menu of the demo atlas. The layer world socio-economic data has been created with Quantum-GIS based on freely availabale data from GeoCommons Finder.

Now double click on the "The digital divide" map in the thematic maps area to open it in Geopublisher's MapComposer (The MapComposer component in Geopublisher allows you to create thematic, interactive and contextualized maps based on the entries in the datapool.). A new window opens and shows an editable view of the map. In the exported atlas, the map would look similar, but with fewer options to manipulate it.

You now see the map "The digital divide". It shows the global distribution of internet bandwidth per capita. Next click the "Legend" tab on the left to access the interactive legend.

Create charts based on global data

In the MapComposer window, you see which layers were used to create your map. The interactive legend always lists all layers, but this map demo map only consists of one layer.

A look at the attributes

Before we start to create charts, let's have a quick look at the attribute table, so that you know what data is available for our tutorial. Click the layer tool menu (ICON) of the world socio-economic data layer and choose attribute table and the attribute table for this layer opens.

The attribute table shows all the attributes that are available for each country. As you can see, out first column contains information on the internet bandwidth available in every country. The third column shows the geographic region the country is part of.

Idea: Let's create a bar chart, that compares the bandwidth availability of the world's regions!

A bar chart comparing regions

With Geopublisher it is easy to create a bar-chart comparing regions and publish it as an interactive part of your atlas. First click the layer tool menu of the world socio-economic data layer and choose Manage charts... .

The chart wizard appears. It will guide you through the basic steps needed to create a chart. In the first step you may choose a chart type. Select bar chart and click Next.

In the second step you may choose the attributes that shall be used for the bar chart. You may use up to four variables (which would create three bars for every region). For our simple example we just choose two attributes: The first attribute defines the categories we want to see bars for. We select the Region attribute. For the second attribute we select the Bandwidth attribute.

In the last step you are asked to enter a title and a description for your chart. This information could be entered in multiple languages, if this atlas was configured to support more than one language, but for our basic example we stick with "just" English.

After you pressed Finish, the chart is created and appears in the list of available charts. Also a chart design dialog will open, that allows to design the layout and appearance of the chart in detail. This first view of the chart we get, is a only a generic proposal. Before we publish the chart to the atlas users, we want to make it more beautiful and "smarter".

At first, enable the Automatic preview checkbox. Now any change will automatically be applied to the preview in the upper part. Unless you have very large or slow (=from the Internet) data, you should always enable the automatic preview.

Configuring axis labelling

In the next step, lets correct the domain axis labelling. The labels are obviously too long and thus the texts overwrite each other. They should be positioned in a different angle. To change the label angle select the domain axis tab.

Moving the slider between 0° and 90° automatically changes the label position in the preview. Tune the slider until you are satisfied with the amount of space the labels take.

Next let's go the bars tab and configure their color. When creating a new chart, the color is selected by random. The bars tab allows you to define the color and other features.

Attribute aggregation

Have you wondered, how the height of these bars is calculated? As you have seen in the attribute table, many countries fall into the same region. Hence their attribute values have to be aggregated using a function you may define in Geopublisher. The following list gives a short explanation of all available aggregation methods in Geopublisher 1.4:

• Count: The value (height) of the bar is the count of countries falling into this category. The actual value of the attribute is ignored.
• Sum: The bar value (height) is equal to the sum of the attribute values of all countries in each category.
• Absolute Sum: The bar value (height) equals the sum of the absolute  attribute value of all countries in a category.
• Average: Calculates the arithmetic average of the attribute values in a category.
• Weighted Average: Calculates the weighted arithmetic average of the attribute values in a category. A second weight attribute has to be selected. See wikipedia for mathematic explanation.
• Median: The bar represents the value (height) of the median value in a category. See wikipedia for mathematic explanation.
• Minimum: The bar represents the value (height) of the smallest value in a category.
• Maximum: The bar represents the value (height) of the biggest value in a category.
• Variance and Standard Deviation: Variance and Standard Deviation are statistical values describing how (in-)homogeneous the values in a category are.

For our example of Internet availability in the world regions we have chosen to select the weighted average aggregation method. How does weighted average aggregation work and when should it be used?

Weighted average attribute aggregation

To explain the difference between weighted and unweighted average, let's image the following table of imaginary values:

Country	Region	Population	Yearly beer consumption [l/per capita]
Germany	A	1000	50
Luxembourg	A	100	100
France	A	1000	20

If unweighted (=normal) average aggregation is selected, the result for region A would be calculated as follows:

mean = ( 1stValue + 2ndValue + 3rdValue ) / number of values

= ( 50 + 100 + 20 ) / 3

= 56,67 l/per capita

This result is not the average beer consumption of region A per capita. The country of Luxembourg is small in comparison to Germany and France and the high beer consumption of its people is overrated in the formula above. To calculate the correct average beer consumption per capita for region A, the population of each country has to be taken into account.

weighted mean = ( 1stValue*1stWeight + 2ndValue*2ndWeight  + 3rdValue*3rdWeight ) / sum of weights

= 50*1000 + 100*100 + 20*1000 / 2100

= 80000 / 2100

= 38,1 l/per capita

The result of the weighted average is the correct yearly beer consumption for all 2100 people in region A. Weighted average should always be used if the attribute values are per capita, per area or have a reference basis in general.

For our example of Internet availability in the world regions, the following settings should be applied in Geopublisher, because the bandwidth attribute data is measured in MBps per capita.

These settings made, you have succsessfully created your first bar chart. Please note, that Geopublisher has automatically created the axis descriptions for you based on meta-data entered for the layer. If you don't like Geopublishers automatic labels, you can always adapt the axis descriptions manually. The resulting bar chart looks like this.

Interactivity between maps and charts

Geopublisher 1.4 has a feature called selection synchronization. It means, that whenever a chart or an attribute table are visible for a map, the user may make selections in each one of them, and Geopublisher automatically synchronizes the selections. For example this allows you to select outlier points in a chart, and see which country/geometry corresponds to this datapoint.

Note: For aggregated bar charts, this functionality is not yet implemented. But for unaggregated bar charts (where one bar corresponds to exactly one geometry) selection synchronization works.

The following two screenshots show the selection synchronization between a scatter plot and a map. In the first image, a selection is made in the scatter plot, and the corresponding countries are highlighted in the map:

The second screenshot shows how a selection is made in the map around South America, and the corresponding data points are highlighted in the chart.

Conclusion

This tutorial showed you how a bar chart based on automatically aggregated attribute values can be created. We did not go into detail about how to create a scatter plot, but the procedure is mainly the same.

Charts are bound to the layer where their data comes from. If a layer is used in multiple maps, Geopublisher allows you to define exactly which charts are available in which maps.

Of course, Geopublisher charts - as all parts of a Geopublisher atlas - can also be translated into multiple languages.

If you have any questions or ideas about the chart functionality, please give us feedback on the AtlasStyler and Geopublisher user mailinglist.

Happy charting!

 

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Existera-t-il bientôt une alternative à GeoExt? C'est ce que semble indiquer en tout cas le "buzz" créé autour du projet GeoJQuery.

Mapping Anywhere ( www.mappinganywhere.com ), le revendeur des produits Arc2Earth pour les régions EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), a le plaisir d'annoncer son partenariat avec la société CARTOLOGIC (Egypte), et l'adoption d'une licence site Arc2Earth Enterprise 2.1 par Telecom Italia comme solution d'interopérabilité pour ses données ArcGIS. - Communiqués de presse

Mapping Anywhere ( www.mappinganywhere.com ), le revendeur des produits Arc2Earth pour les régions EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), a le plaisir d'annoncer son partenariat avec la société CARTOLOGIC (Egypte), et l'adoption d'une licence site Arc2Earth Enterprise 2.1 par Telecom Italia comme solution d'interopérabilité pour ses données ArcGIS. - Communiqués de presse

Mapping Anywhere ( www.mappinganywhere.com ), le revendeur des produits Arc2Earth pour les régions EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), a le plaisir d'annoncer son partenariat avec la société CARTOLOGIC (Egypte), et l'adoption d'une licence site Arc2Earth Enterprise 2.1 par Telecom Italia comme solution d'interopérabilité pour ses données ArcGIS. - Communiqués de presse

Mapping Anywhere ( www.mappinganywhere.com ), le revendeur des produits Arc2Earth pour les régions EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), a le plaisir d'annoncer son partenariat avec la société CARTOLOGIC (Egypte), et l'adoption d'une licence site Arc2Earth Enterprise 2.1 par Telecom Italia comme solution d'interopérabilité pour ses données ArcGIS. - Communiqués de presse

Mapping Anywhere ( www.mappinganywhere.com ), le revendeur des produits Arc2Earth pour les régions EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), a le plaisir d'annoncer son partenariat avec la société CARTOLOGIC (Egypte), et l'adoption d'une licence site Arc2Earth Enterprise 2.1 par Telecom Italia comme solution d'interopérabilité pour ses données ArcGIS. - Communiqués de presse

Mapping Anywhere ( www.mappinganywhere.com ), le revendeur des produits Arc2Earth pour les régions EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), a le plaisir d'annoncer son partenariat avec la société CARTOLOGIC (Egypte), et l'adoption d'une licence site Arc2Earth Enterprise 2.1 par Telecom Italia comme solution d'interopérabilité pour ses données ArcGIS. - Communiqués de presse

Mapping Anywhere ( www.mappinganywhere.com ), le revendeur des produits Arc2Earth pour les régions EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), a le plaisir d'annoncer son partenariat avec la société CARTOLOGIC (Egypte), et l'adoption d'une licence site Arc2Earth Enterprise 2.1 par Telecom Italia comme solution d'interopérabilité pour ses données ArcGIS. - Communiqués de presse

Mapping Anywhere ( www.mappinganywhere.com ), le revendeur des produits Arc2Earth pour les régions EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), a le plaisir d'annoncer son partenariat avec la société CARTOLOGIC (Egypte), et l'adoption d'une licence site Arc2Earth Enterprise 2.1 par Telecom Italia comme solution d'interopérabilité pour ses données ArcGIS. - Communiqués de presse