Obligatory Top 10 WeoGeo Datasets of 2012
What kind of blogger would I be if I didn’t throw out my own top 10 list?
There was a lot of data posted to WeoGeo Market in 2012. Picking my favorites was not easy and since you are supposed to do a top 10 list this time of year, I figured why not do one with data on WeoGeo. What’s special about all these datasets is that they are free to download and have been liberated from difficult to use websites.
It was a great year for us getting raw geospatial datasets in an easily digestible system. As I said over there, 2013 will even be better with our freely available, curated, authoritative datasets. Giddy up!
http://market.weogeo.com/datasets/osm-openstreetmap-planet/widget.html?zoom=13&lat=3951741.3403835&lon=-12461564.324589
OpenStreetMap Planet
This Week’s Hangout:: Going above and beyond with Uber Weather
Well we’re back at it with the hangouts right away in 2013. This week’s special guest is James Swansburg of Uber Weather to talk about his new weather application. James came to our attention when he used our OSM dataset to get ski resort chair lifts on his weather map. We’ll talk about why he wants to use OSM data, how Uber Weather is doing in the Google Places API Challenge and how James uses spatial data in his applications. OSM data is very powerful and this is just another great example of using it to give your applications a little something extra, easily. As always we go live at 10am PDT on the WeoGeo Video page.
We’ll be talking on the IRC channel again so either show up to the Hangout page on WeoGeo or better yet, point your IRC client to #hwjf on chat.freenode.net.
HWJF
The one where mapping web services are free for the taking
The first hangout this year was all about using mapping web services. James Swansburg of Uber Weather came in to talk about how he’s using the Google Maps API, other Google APIs, Fusion Tables, and Azure to create his weather application, Uber Weather. Uber Weather is in the Google Places API Developer Challenge 2012 and is awaiting the final judging results. We talked about how James is using Google services such as mapping, weather, Flight Explorer and other services. We also talked about how WeoGeo made using OSM data easier for him to integrate (that’s how I met him).
As always, you can review the IRC log on the WeoGeo Video page.
We’re moving Hangouts with James Fee to bi-weekly this year so our next hangout will be January 16th with Ian White of Urban Mapping. That should be a great time.
The one where mapping web services are free for the taking
The first hangout this year was all about using mapping web services. James Swansburg of Uber Weather came in to talk about how he’s using the Google Maps API, other Google APIs, Fusion Tables, and Azure to create his weather application, Uber Weather. Uber Weather is in the Google Places API Developer Challenge 2012 and is awaiting the final judging results. We talked about how James is using Google services such as mapping, weather, Flight Explorer and other services. We also talked about how WeoGeo made using OSM data easier for him to integrate (that’s how I met him).
As always, you can review the IRC log on the WeoGeo Video page.
We’re moving Hangouts with James Fee to bi-weekly this year so our next hangout will be January 16th with Ian White of Urban Mapping. That should be a great time.
Why d3 Will Change How We Publish Maps
Publishing maps to the web. Simple right? Just reproject all your data to web mercator and be done with it. Have we all learned to live with the crazy distortion? Do we need mercator to help us get our galleons from the Spanish Main back to the king? Of course not, but we’ve all learned the world is not flat since then.
Bill Gates
Five years ago I complained about polar projections because of a project I was working on. I even offered up a SVG example from Esri’s ArcWeb project (that’s how desperate I was!). What I ended up doing is using web mercator and then “transitioning” to Bipolar Oblique Conic Conformal as needed. It was ugly but the client was happy.
Well I’ve never really abandoned this quest. SVG has always seemed to hold a promise for client side projections of data, but support has been weak. This fall a new project has really gotten my attention, D3.
D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG and CSS. D3’s emphasis on web standards gives you the full capabilities of modern browsers without tying yourself to a proprietary framework, combining powerful visualization components and a data-driven approach to DOM manipulation.
Bingo, D3 takes the browser out of the equation so you can just focus on the visualization. The really cool thing about D3 is that it gives you geographic projections. You can even add your own custom projections. Finally a library that gives you the ability to publish the data the way you want, rather than shoehorning it into some crazy projection named after a guy who probably thought there were sea monsters.
The examples are great and this sick D3 satellite view from @vtcraghead
D3 Sat
Why d3 Will Change How We Publish Maps
Publishing maps to the web. Simple right? Just reproject all your data to web mercator and be done with it. Have we all learned to live with the crazy distortion? Do we need mercator to help us get our galleons from the Spanish Main back to the king? Of course not, but we’ve all learned the world is not flat since then.
Bill Gates
Five years ago I complained about polar projections because of a project I was working on. I even offered up a SVG example from Esri’s ArcWeb project (that’s how desperate I was!). What I ended up doing is using web mercator and then “transitioning” to Bipolar Oblique Conic Conformal as needed. It was ugly but the client was happy.
Well I’ve never really abandoned this quest. SVG has always seemed to hold a promise for client side projections of data, but support has been weak. This fall a new project has really gotten my attention, D3.
D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG and CSS. D3’s emphasis on web standards gives you the full capabilities of modern browsers without tying yourself to a proprietary framework, combining powerful visualization components and a data-driven approach to DOM manipulation.
Bingo, D3 takes the browser out of the equation so you can just focus on the visualization. The really cool thing about D3 is that it gives you geographic projections. You can even add your own custom projections. Finally a library that gives you the ability to publish the data the way you want, rather than shoehorning it into some crazy projection named after a guy who probably thought there were sea monsters.
The examples are great and this sick D3 satellite view from @vtcraghead
D3 Sat