Upcoming Hangouts with James Fee - I am on a Boat
Hangouts with James Fee starts back up with the crew from Mapbox. Eric Gundersen, Tom MacWright and Lyzi Diamond join me to talk about vector tiles, cartography, APIs, satellite images, aircraft carriers and much more. We go live at 2pm PDT this Thursday (May 26th) on Google Hangouts.
GIS is Easy, Visualization is Hard
Yesterday I said this:
https://twitter.com/jamesmfee/status/715313620523962368
When you get to the core of GIS, it is database management. Managing spatial data and performing analysis is what most GIS people do. But when it comes time to present that information, GIS people generally struggle with it. If you are like me, you can tell what maps are made with Esri’s ArcMap pretty easy. They just have those elements that nobody changes. That’s because it is hard to pick the right colors, get labeling just right and convey to the reader what the map is all about. Most good cartographers take years perfecting their maps which most of us don’t have that kind of time1.
There has been a ton of effort in making it easier to product good looking visualizations without having to know what you are doing. Just look at CartoDB and Mapbox and you can see some nice out of the box visualization. We are getting there but too often we fumble our message on poor mapping. Even in the 3D world getting the lighting just right on your features (dense buildings for example) can make or break how your data is viewed. Too often we work so hard on the analytical data side of things just to fall down the stairs while we rush to get the product out the door. Do not be a Pete Campbell.
- now let me be clear, I could never produce at map like Tom does even if you gave me forever to do it in. ↩︎
GIS is Easy, Visualization is Hard
Yesterday I said this:
https://twitter.com/jamesmfee/status/715313620523962368
When you get to the core of GIS, it is database management. Managing spatial data and performing analysis is what most GIS people do. But when it comes time to present that information, GIS people generally struggle with it. If you are like me, you can tell what maps are made with Esri’s ArcMap pretty easy. They just have those elements that nobody changes. That’s because it is hard to pick the right colors, get labeling just right and convey to the reader what the map is all about. Most good cartographers take years perfecting their maps which most of us don’t have that kind of time1.
There has been a ton of effort in making it easier to product good looking visualizations without having to know what you are doing. Just look at CartoDB and Mapbox and you can see some nice out of the box visualization. We are getting there but too often we fumble our message on poor mapping. Even in the 3D world getting the lighting just right on your features (dense buildings for example) can make or break how your data is viewed. Too often we work so hard on the analytical data side of things just to fall down the stairs while we rush to get the product out the door. Do not be a Pete Campbell.
- now let me be clear, I could never produce at map like Tom does even if you gave me forever to do it in. ↩︎
Curves in Open Data
Last week I talked about data formats and we continued it on Twitter.
@cageyjames no curves
— Craig Williams (@williamscraigm) March 23, 2016
No curves. It’s a good point. GeoJSON and TopoJSON don’t support curves. But neither does Shapefiles. All three formats are meant to handle simple features. Points, polygons and line. Whereas TopoJSON handles topology, it still can’t draw true curves. But what’s the implication here? To share data that requires curves (it’s an edge case but still an important one) you have to use a proprietary format? Enter WKT. Well-known text supports much more vector types than the previous including curves. Following up on sharing data in common file formats, WKT fits the bill perfectly. Share your data as GeoJSON/TopoJSON, KML and Shapefile if needed, then use WKT for complex features. Still open completely and it is well supported with most open and proprietary software packages.
Sometimes you need to use curves and generally it does work out.
Curves in Open Data
Last week I talked about data formats and we continued it on Twitter.
@cageyjames no curves
— Craig Williams (@williamscraigm) March 23, 2016
No curves. It’s a good point. GeoJSON and TopoJSON don’t support curves. But neither does Shapefiles. All three formats are meant to handle simple features. Points, polygons and line. Whereas TopoJSON handles topology, it still can’t draw true curves. But what’s the implication here? To share data that requires curves (it’s an edge case but still an important one) you have to use a proprietary format? Enter WKT. Well-known text supports much more vector types than the previous including curves. Following up on sharing data in common file formats, WKT fits the bill perfectly. Share your data as GeoJSON/TopoJSON, KML and Shapefile if needed, then use WKT for complex features. Still open completely and it is well supported with most open and proprietary software packages.
Sometimes you need to use curves and generally it does work out.
3D Underground
There are plenty of 3D globes for desktop and for web that support above ground objects (mostly buildings) on the globe but there are few that support features underground (such as wells). The only one that really has good support is Esri’s CityEngine. You can render scenes such as this in the browser.
Now the problem is that this all requires CityEngine which is neither inexpensive nor easy to use. I’ve got a great database of wells with GeoJSON attributes that I’d love to map on a 3D browser view but most of the efforts so far have been put into 2.5D solutions. Most of my current project work is 3D but underground which means that I can’t view on Google Earth or other web solutions.
I get all excite to map wells and then disaster strikes.
