The World… She Be a Changing…

The speed at which technology flows these days still impresses me. It seems like just yesterday I was watching TV on a TV, reading books on paper and listening to music on something called a walkman. My son asked me what a modem was and how it worked with my iPhone. Clearly we are all in trouble.

  • Brian Flood is correctly impressed with the World Resources Institute Reefs Map rendering 63,000 polygons with Google Fusion Tables faster than you can scream AXL.
  • Take a look at the Atlas of New South Wales.  I love how it is organized for actual people and not technologists.  I suspect it will be used quite a bit by the good folks upside-down on the other side of the world.  Take note, organize information by how people understand it to be, not by how you think it should be.  I’m not as smart as I think I am and neither are you.
  • The OpenLayers community has been sprinting in some neutral country in Europe.  The main goal, only something where they get OpenLayers to support mobile devices better.  Sounds like they have made some great progress.
  • When you see an article with “Gov 2.0″ in the title you can but not help but cringe.  That said the awesome that is TileMill is only to apparent to everyone.  CSS is the future, stop using SLD everyone.
  • Speaking of freaking amazing, how about this?  Noncontiguous cartograms in OpenLayers and Polymaps 1.  OpenLayers + Polymaps 2 is a winning combination.  God bless Ian Turton for pushing a SLD/GeoServer example 3 in the comments.
  • Do you use ArcGIS Server with OpenLayers?  Thank the Azavea guys for making that happen.
  • Lastly, lets all start putting the fork in the IT department and just name them “the help desk”.  Why we hold on to such nonsense is beyond me.  We are all IT staff tonight! 4

Have a great weekend folks, baseball is back in session!

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Five Great Fusion Tables + Maps Examples

WikiEDdata – Mapping Poverty in Washington School Districts


The most powerful maps allow users to quickly understand the significance of large amounts of data. Using Fusion Tables, polygons representing school districts and poverty levels are rendered and colored based on their assigned values in the tables.

Clicking on a district polygon will bring up an infowindow containing a poverty line data chart, dynamically generated through the Google Chart API.

Reporting Road Potholes in Spain


Fusion Tables makes crowdsourcing easy. Using Fusion Tables, Otrobache.com allows Madrid citizens to log on and report the location of potholes. The newly reported potholes appear on the map in real time (as soon as the map is refreshed).

The Telegraph – UK Charities Map


Fusion Tables is a great way to store and quickly render large amounts of data. The Telegraph used Fusion Tables to catalog and map literally tens of thousands of charities throughout the UK.

Analyzing Concealed Handgun Licenses in San Antonio


From San Antonio Express-News, “The Texas Tribune analyzed a Department of Public Safety database that tracks concealed handgun licenses in Texas. The Tribune’s analysis found that the number of gun permits in an area often correlates with income and political beliefs.”

Fusion Tables is used here to overlay the data with boundaries and view possible correlations. The implementation also makes use of Gradient styling. Gradients allows developers to specify a color ramp and a number range; features will be displayed in the color appropriate for where they belong in the range. Much like the built-in Intensity map visualization, but now you can change the colors and use your own boundaries!

Boris Bikes on Fusion Tables


Using geometry styling controls in Fusion tables, this implementation is a live visualization of London Cycle Hire Rank availability using data from the Boris Bikes API.

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