Spatially Adjusted » maps

If a Yahoo! Turns off Their Maps API and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

James Fee — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 17:26:44 +0000

Last week something very unsurprising happened:

As part of Yahoo!’s commitment to creating deeply personal digital experiences, we have been reprioritizing our current portfolio of mapping products to refocus on a great consumer Mapping and Local Search experience.

So there you go, finally Yahoo! Maps API is going away. Seems like just a couple years ago, Yahoo! was one the most prolific GeoAPI companies. Now they are telling you to go look at OviMaps which might be just as unused as Yahoo!’s own APIs.

Jerry Yang seems still excited about Yahoo!’s chances though.

Thanks for visiting Yahoo! Now go find your APIs somewhere else.

Yahoo! Maps, Bing and Google [Oh My]!

James Fee — Thu, 19 May 2011 18:08:36 +0000

This gem was shared by Marc Prioleau.

Internet firm Yahoo (NASDAQ: YHOO) may replace its Geo-Platform with Google’s (NASDAQ:GOOG), a move that could reduce its operating costs by about 2 percent to 5 percent, according to an analyst at Global Equities Research.

“Yahoo Geo-platform is lagging behind both Google and Microsoft Geo-Platform,” analyst Trip Chowdhry wrote in a note to clients.

Adena Schutzberg cuts to the chase:

There are so many errors in the IB Times article discussing the note, errors I fear are from the original note, I am very skeptical.

My Grandmother, bless her heart, always told me; “If you don’t know what you are talking about, keep your mouth shut!”. Clearly that doesn’t apply to “analysts”. To be fair, he did call Salesforce.com a “modern day Visi-Calc”. Wait, that wasn’t right…

New York City Census Analysis — Using Google Fusion Tables

James Fee — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 15:00:42 +0000

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Simple wins out every time. Case in point, working with demographic information. Sure you can spin it up all up in a spatial database, analyse it with R and then output some pretty PDFs. Or just roll it all in to Google Fusion Tables and output this beautiful thing.

WNYC 2010 Census Maps

John Keefe shows how he did it. Spoiler alert!

Using Google Fusion Tables made it super easy to manage, map and serve up a lot of data. And the FT feedback team was fantastic about responding to questions and glitches I encountered along the way.

Yup, love it! I can even embed it here. Great job!

http://project.wnyc.org/census-maps/2010pop.html?lat=40.7739&lon=-73.9456&zoom=12&sel=6

ArcGIS Explorer Online Beta is Released

James Fee — Wed, 26 May 2010 16:24:13 +0000

So hopefully not lost in the ArcGIS.com release is ESRI’s latest GIS tool, ArcGIS Explorer. The one sentence explanation from ESRI about what it is:

ArcGIS Explorer Online is similar in appearance to the desktop version of ArcGIS Explorer, and has some of the same capabilities, but it’s a lighter weight version that works in a browser, and is built using Microsoft Silverlight.

ArcGIS Explorer Online is a Silverlight based browser application

So what we have here is a cross platform GIS analysis platform. I’ve liked what I’ve seen from ArcGIS Explorer Online and I think it is a solid start to platform agnostic client applications. It requires Silverlight to run, but I’m able to use it flawlessly on my MacBook Pro laptop. It mimics the Microsoft UI standards with the ribbon, but I’ll be frank that I’m beginning to like the ribbon interface. Of course if you hate it, you’ll probably hate the app.

Presentations are important to ESRI and ArcGIS Explorer Online

When you start working with the app, the first thing that will catch your eye is what ESRI has stuck in the upper left of the toolbar. If I had never seen ArcGIS Explorer Online before, I’d assume that ESRI would have put “Add Data” or “Search” or even “Basemap” in that prime spot. But as you can see to the left, Presentation gets the first place everyone looks. I’m not sure if this is by design but ESRI thinks we’ll be making lots of presentations with ArcGIS Online. I had see Bernie Szukalski use the presentation mode with great success at the ESRI Developer and Business Partner conferences so I get the power. I’d just assume presentations would be a ribbon on its own and not on the primary one.

The basemap button doesn’t disappoint. If there is one thing ESRI has gotten right over the years, it is the freely available basemaps they’ve offered up through ArcGIS Online ArcGIS.com. These are all available here including the Bing layers, ESRI’s Imagery and Streets, the wonderful ESRI Topographic map and of course now the OpenStreetMap layer.

There are tons of basemaps available including OpenStreetMap

Adding content is where I think ArcGIS Explorer Online will eventually shine, but for right now it is limited to only web services that are available on ArcGIS.com or ArcGIS Server services. I’ve been told OGC support will be coming soon, but as of today you can only add ESRI web services or consume services from ArcGIS.com.

As you’d expect, you can save your maps to ArcGIS.com and choose to save them privately, share with a group or share with the world. There is no ability to share a permalink as you might with Google Maps, but saving to ArcGIS.com and then sharing that URL is probably the method for now. ESRI also has provided some “Featured Maps” (I’m assuming this comes from featured maps on ArcGIS.com) that you can get started with.

You can grab existing "Featured Maps" that ESRI provides to get started.

I like the start of ArcGIS Explorer Online. Building it on Silverlight seems like a smart move as it runs flawlessly on any computer I used. The biggest limitation I see right now is the lack of OGC support (WMS, WFS, CSW and of course KML) but ESRI has told me that is coming down the road. I also would have liked to see a permalink feature to share quickly with friends maps I create, but I’m guessing ArcGIS.com is the driving force here so I might as well get used to sharing ArcGIS.com links. I’m not sure how I could share my ArcGIS Server services with ArcGIS Explorer Online (embed or link that I can put in a blog post), but hopefully that part of the story will be set by the ESRI UC.

College Football Team Travel Maps

James Fee — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 17:21:22 +0000

MapGameDay.com has a new section called the Travel Map. The section contains conference and team road game data collected for regular season games from the 1998 through the 2007 NCAA Football schedule. As you might guess, any conference with a team in Hawaii would probably lead the rankings in miles traveled and the WAC does not disappoint. What amazed me though was that Georgia has traveled a total of 358 miles for non-conference road games (only traveling out of conference to Georgia Tech and Clemson) since 1998 but Hawaii has traveled 72,918 total miles (coupled with the fact that they still have to travel 4,037.56 miles to play LaTech in conference). The Travel Map is very interesting to see how little large schools travel out of conference (Arizona State is no exception). The conference rankings are below:

Conference Travel Miles
WAC     327,521
Conference USA    278,991
MWC     188,308
Sun Belt     154,512
PAC 10     150,990
MAC     127,212
Big East     127,076
Big Ten     107,881
ACC     101,545
Big 12     73,183
SEC     42,141