Author: James

Today the National Park Service and MapBox announced the launch of Park Tiles. These are some absolutely beautiful tiles built with TileMill, hosted by MapBox and designed by the NPS. From the NPMap Blog:

Park Tiles is not meant to be a total replacement for any of the basemaps we currently use. It is, rather, meant to give us an alternative basemap we can use in custom projects where we’d like to see our National Parks highlighted. We’d also like to incorporate more detailed park information (such as campsites, visitor centers, trails, etc.) at larger scales that can serve both NPS employees and visitors.

Basically they want more control over their base layers than they do with basemaps from Bing, Esri and Google (probably even MapBox too). So they decided to use TileMill to author and MapBox to host these gorgeous maps. I encourage everyone to read that blog post by Mamata Akella because it goes into detail about the design, data and technology that make up these maps.

Long time Esri users may recognize Mamata because she was key in the development of the Esri world topographic map and the canvas maps. Well it seems she’s moved on to the NPS and is creating amazing maps using TileMill.

MapBox has some more information on the project including a really cool features available to MapBox users. I like how the map is layered so you can turn off parks, road shields and other features as you need to for your applications.

I can’t wait to see the detail get rendered for the whole country. You can view the maps online right now and if you click on the “Switch to Mt. Rainier” button, you’ll see the large scale prototype of Mt. Rainier National Park that uses all OSM data. Simply beautiful!

We go live at 11 am MST. The video feed will be below…

As always we’ll be talking on IRC. Join #hwjf on chat.freenote.com or online.

We’ve got a great hangout this week, Matt Baker joins me to talk about using open source software for GIS, graphics, publishing and everything in between. What happens when you go all open source? Clearly you can not only do your job, but thrive. Matt will be screensharing so we’ll have some great examples.

Join us at 11am MST (10am PST) to learn more!

Matt’s also got some podcasts on using FOSS for geospatial. Part 1, Part 2

Last week I mentioned that GIS applications are so hard to use in workflows. It’s like an old Yakov Smirnoff joke:

In the real world, software works for you.
In GIS, you work for the software!

It’s not to say you can’t get value out of traditional GIS packages, just that you’re locked into doing things their way. I was just about to write a clever analogy but I think I’ll keep this simple. When in your GIS package, you generally are limited to only their processing tools. While this does allow you to gain familiarity with their use, you end up making compromises to get things done. You can buy your groceries at the gas station convenience store, but you have to work hard to make it all happen (wait, did I just use analogy anyway?). It’s at the supermarket where you can choose from 20 different kinds of marinara sauce to get exactly the right one.

I really think GIS is like a supermarket. When you do your projects outside of these proprietary GIS applications, it gives you the freedom to pick and choose which analytical libraries you want to get each analysis done. I can use GDAL, Arc.py, sci.py, R and even some Erdas to get my work done. Just how I’d make dinner, pulling different ingredients from different companies. Just like some nice ziti, you end up with great output and something that works wonderful with your work flows.

My feelings are GIS software should adapt to how I work, not the other way around. You should too…

We go live at 10 am MST.

We’ll be talking on the IRC channel again so either use the IRC Web Client or better yet, point your IRC client to #hwjf on chat.freenode.net.

The hipsters are hating on Mercator all over twitter and the blogs. I don’t know about you but I’m grateful for Mercator every time I travel. I seem to move left and right from Phoenix on a map. Plus who cares about Greenland? Let them have their big map, you don’t want to live there anyway.

Look, if you’d rather live in a world of the Bonne projection I won’t stop you. I’ll just come find you on my practical Mercator map.

Map CC-By-SA: Strebe

I’ve been helping a couple people out the past week or two with some GIS projects, since I have some time…

Anyway, it is a good reminder as to why I’ve been trying to change how I do GIS. It all feels like trying to use a screw driver to hammer a nail. So much of what we do is one compromise over another. I picked up a project and I swear the PM put his hand on my shoulder and said, “I’m sorry”. What a miserable life we all lead.

//embedr.flickr.com/assets/client-code.js

Well it’s time to start things back up, Friday, February 1st at 10am MST. Hangouts With James Fee: Attitudes Across Latitudes will have our first guest since “the break”. Ian White of Urban Mapping joins me to talk about why he was the last host of This Week in Maps (i can’t even find a link to it) podcast to join my hangout. WeoGeo was kind enough to give me all the code for the webpages, but I’ve been too busy to get that all back up. In the meantime I’m doing this old-school on Google+ Events. Just go to the event page and it will take care of everything else.

As always we’ll be talking on IRC. Join #hwjf on chat.freenote.com or online.

Looks like the NACIS has a new award that recognizes “imaginative cartography” aptly named the Corlis Benefideo Award for Imaginative Cartography.

Cartography is often seen by the public as work opposed to imagination, grounded entirely in established fact. While this devotion to reflecting what is forms the heart of cartographic thinking, cartographers and artists who use maps as a basis for their work can (and do) take that grounding in fact and use it to venture into the world of the possible. Some explore real places from perspectives that allow us to see it fresh and full of possibility, and some take our established traditions of mapmaking, and indeed take fully-constructed maps themselves, and turn them on their heads to make us see ourselves anew. This award is to recognize this work and the perspective it brings to the field of cartography, and the contributions it makes to the world as a whole.

Sounds quite interesting, doesn’t it? All nominations should be submitted by email to cb@nacis.org. The deadline for nominations is March 15, 2013. More details on what needs to be submitted is on the webpage. I wasn’t aware of who Corlis Benefideo was but this old blog post should fill you in.

Well happy Friday to all of us, I have a 50% off code for PostGIS in Action, Second Edition!

Between now and January 22nd, use pgislaunchau and get 50% off the price of the book. It also includes a free ebook of the first edition to tide you over. Let’s face it, PostGIS is the defacto choice for most GIS people and this is the bible to make you proficient. Don’t hesitate, the 22nd is right around the corner.