The Map Room

I’ve been hearing about PostGIS in Action for a couple of years now, so I’m surprised that it only came out (in print form, at least) last month. Richard Marsden reviews it on Geoweb Guru: “This is the first book to be published that covers PostGIS in depth, and as such should be a welcome addition to most open source geospatial bookshelves.”

Previously: PostGIS in Action Reviewed.

• Buy PostGIS in Action at Amazon.com (Canada, UK)

Esri reports that Landsat data dating back to 1972 is now available through ArcGIS Online.

Via GIS Lounge, a five-part series from the Chicago Tribune’s News Apps Blog about “making choropleth maps using PostGIS, TileMill, Mapnik and Google Maps” — the end result being this population map of Illinois. Start with part one, here (fortunately, each post links to the other parts).

Two more GIS books to mention: Web GIS: Principles and Applications by Pinde Fu and Jiulin Sun, from Esri Press (via Esri Mapping Center); and Spatial Analysis and Modeling in Geographical Transformation Process, edited by Y. Murayama and Rajesh Bahadur Thapa, from Springer (via @MattArtz).

• Buy Web GIS: Principles and Applications at Amazon.com (Canada, UK)

Adena Schutzberg reviews Muki Huklay’s Interacting with Geospatial Technologies. Despite quibbles about the graphics and the copyediting, Adena says, “This is a solid book that pulls together the research in what hopefully will be a growing area of study for the GIS community.”

Jeff Thurston reviews The GIS 20: Essential Skills by Gina Clemmer. “The book is concise, focused and provides the details that one needs to know to work with ArcGIS, including those transitioning within ArcGIS versions. First time users or even those who may have forgotten some of the basic skills and the way to accomplish them will appreciate this book.” Via Slashgeo.

Very Spatial notes that the deadline for submitting to the 26th volume of the ESRI Map Book (previously) is November 19, 2010; a few previous volumes of the ESRI Map Book — namely, volumes 1 and 20-25 — are available online.

We first heard about Margaret Maher’s Lining Up Data in ArcGIS back in June; on ESRI Mapping Center, Maher explains the inspiration for writing the book.

• Buy Interacting with Geospatial Technologies at Amazon.com
• Buy The GIS 20: Essential Skills at Amazon.com
• Buy Lining Up Data in ArcGIS at Amazon.com

Today’s Globe and Mail included this article discussing how GIS helps business productivity, with an aside on the challenge of getting good data in Canada (exacerbated by the federal government’s recent decision to drop the long-form census). Via All Points…  •  Continue reading this entry.

James Fee reviews iExtMap, a mobile GIS viewer for the iPhone and iPod touch (it’ll work on an iPad, but not natively). iTunes link. Despite some issues, “I think there is a ton to like about iExtMap,” says James. “Out…  •  Continue reading this entry.

With “father of GIS” Roger Tomlinson receiving the National Geographic Society’s Bell Medal earlier this month, the “local-boy-makes-good” story is inevitable: the Ottawa Citizen has a profile. (This is not his first major award; he’s already got the Order of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

James Cheshire offers his first impressions of the new ArcGIS iPhone/iPod touch/iPad app. I’m continuing to poke away at it on my iPad, but as I’ve said before, people who know their ArcGIS are better situated to evaluate this…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Last week, the National Geographic Society honoured two giants of the GIS field — Roger Tomlinson, who practically created GIS in the 1960s while working for the Canadian government, and Jack Dangermond, and ESRI/Esri founder/president/CEO Jack Dangermond — with the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

ESRI’s ArcGIS for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch is now available in the iTunes app store. It’s a free download that, among other things, provides access to ArcGIS Online. I’ve installed it on my iPad and have been…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Bill Dollins reviews PostGIS in Action by Regina Obe and Leo Hsu (see previous entry). “This book addresses a problem I have run into repeatedly in my consulting work: educating database professionals (DBAs, developers, etc.) on working with spatial…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The University of Minnesota’s campus paper, The Minnesota Daily, takes a look at the University’s Antarctic Geospatial Information Center (AGIC), which provides maps and GIS analysis to Antarctic researchers….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Sean Connin asks what happened to neogeography, a concept that seemed all the rage not so long ago; his answer: that “neogeography” — i.e., web-based mapping tools — has gotten confused and conflated with GIS, which used to be neogeography’s…  •  Continue reading this entry.

SERVIR produces maps and data for Central America and the Caribbean, including maps for disaster support. Maps of the Haitian earthquake produced to date include damage assessments from satellite imagery, including damage to Port-au-Prince’s seaport, and a map showing…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A Gentle Introduction to GIS (114-page PDF; online supplements here) is a beginner’s guide that uses the open-source Quantum GIS for its examples; the project was sponsored by the government of Eastern Cape, South Africa. Via GIS Lounge and Slashgeo….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Integrity Logic blog looks at some of the things that can be done with elevation data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM); it gets particularly interesting when the SRTM data picks up artificial structures like skyscrapers and landfills….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Michalis Avraam has compiled a list of the essential skills for a successful GIS career, based on a discussion at a GIS Day event in Seattle. Via Slashgeo….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The grass is always greener on the other side, Peter Batty argues in this rather funny “georant” at last week’s AGI GeoCommunity 09 in which he defends the Ordnance Survey, sort of, by pointing out that there are significant…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Western Illinois University librarian Linda Zellmer has compiled a list of state online atlases of various sorts, from online GIS to Google Maps mashups, and from general atlases to those limited to specific topics. Via MAPS-L….  •  Continue reading this entry.

More reviews of books previously mentioned here: Directions reviews GIS Cartography: A Guide to Effective Map Design (see previous entry). The New York Times reviews The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet, a copy of which I now have and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

James reviews Gretchen N. Peterson’s GIS Cartography: A Guide to Effective Map Design, which, he notes, is written independent of any particular software package. “Gretchen’s book is something that you can use almost anywhere with any medium and won’t…  •  Continue reading this entry.

It looks like GIS Web Maps will be a blog that critiques GIS web mapping: “I usually don’t have that much to say. But I know good when I see it. I know bad when I see it. I usually…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Briefly noted: Mike Parker’s Map Addict (see previous entry) is reviewed on the Collins Maps blog. GIS Pathway reviews Gretchen N. Peterson’s GIS Cartography: A Guide to Effective Map Design. James Fee notes the upcoming publication of PostGIS in Action…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Truth be told, I’d never heard of the name “GIS Alley” before today, but it refers to the large group of geospatial companies located in and around Fort Collins, Colorado. Here’s a puff piece in the Fort Collins Coloradoan by…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Mac isn’t exactly known as the most GIS-friendly platform out there, but Leszek has compiled a list of free, Mac-compatible GIS applications (most of them are cross-platform rather than Mac-only)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Apart from some rather obscure industry in-jokes and an atrocious pun, the focus of this year’s geospatial-industry silliness seems to be Google Street View and its impact on privacy. Google Earth Blog announces that the next-generation Street View will include…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The need for accurate and up-to-date maps during a natural disaster or other humanitarian crisis is obvious. Teaching humanitarian aid workers how to make use of maps and mapping software is the idea behind the Field Guide to Humanitarian…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Briefly noted: Geoweb Guru reviews Scott Davis’s GIS for Web Developers; on Vector One, Jeff shares his notes on three recent books from ESRI Press (Building a GIS by Dave Peters, the second edition of Getting to Know ArcGIS Desktop,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A flurry of announcements last week related to Silverlight, Microsoft’s rich media browser plugin. Some will be of interest largely to geospatial professionals or web developers, like the public beta of the ArcGIS API for Silverlight or the Virtual Earth…  •  Continue reading this entry.

GIS for Dummies is now out (see previous entry); Leszek has some information about the author, Michael DeMers, an associate professor of geography at NMSU and the author of several other books on GIS, including the textbook Fundamentals of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

ESRI Press has just published the sixth edition of Map Use: Reading and Analysis, which it acquired from its previous publisher. From the press release: “Replete with nearly 500 maps, photographs, tables, and charts to illustrate the text, this…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Age has a brief piece on the geospatial science program at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology — “apparently the only dedicated cartography degree in Victoria and one of only two in Australia.”…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Briefly noted: GeoWeb Guru has a review of Geography Mark-Up Language: Foundation for the Geo-Web by Ron Lake et al. (via Slashgeo); Google Earth Blog reviews Josie Wernecke’s KML Handbook (previously); Vector One reports on the first A-level GIS…  •  Continue reading this entry.

“Data for Decision” is a 1967 National Film Board of Canada film that explains the work of the Canada Geographic Information System — one of the earliest GISes in history, if not the earliest — in analysing the huge…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Charlie Frye has an interesting post up on the ESRI Mapping Center blog about the challenge of having to make a map with “unfit” data. “Unfit data will never work to make a good map. It’s a fact,” he writes….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Version 8.0 of MAPublisher, the suite of cartographic plug-ins for Adobe Illustrator, was released Monday. Costs US$1,249; upgrades as low as US$549. Via MacNN. Previously: MAPublisher 7.0; MAPublisher 6.0….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Ogle Earth points to the preview release of Cartographica, a GIS application for the Mac. You’ll have to make do with Stefan’s first impressions; I’m even less of a GIS pro than he says he is, and have no…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Understanding Google Maps & Yahoo Local Search is self-explanatory. Renalid is dead; Renaud Euvrard is now collaborating with Audrey Malherbe at their new blog, GeoInWeb (en français, bien sûr). GIS Pathway is a site — it has an RSS…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A debate on the question of what GIS can offer world history, based on this article by J. B. Owens (PDF), triggered a lengthy discussion on MapHist earlier this month. Unfortunately, the MapHist discussion was sidetracked by a throwaway comment…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Another profile of the GIS going on in a city planning office, this time from the Missoulian, which looks at the City and County of Missoula’s combined Office of Planning and Grants and its senior GIS specialist and mapmaker, Casey…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Hurricane Gustav Tracking Maps Firstcoastnews.com FLHurricane.com IbisEye MIBAZAAR MSNBC StormAdvisory (click on Gustav) Wundermap Some are better than others; IbisEye, MSNBC and Wundermap are standouts. Via Anything Geospatial, Google Maps Mania, Kottke and La Cartoteca. Hurricane Gustav in Google Earth…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The New York Ocean and Great Lakes Atlas, an online atlas of the state’s water resources, was announced yesterday. From the press release: “Currently, more than 200 data sets that contain information on such resources as storm drains, wetland boundaries,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

As reported last year, the provincial government of British Columbia is making its geographic databases available online and via Google Earth. The announcement was made last Friday; the Vancouver Sun has coverage. Via, and more at, AnyGeo….  •  Continue reading this entry.

James is looking forward to two upcoming books on GIS from ESRI Press: Building a GIS (Amazon) and The Business Benefits of GIS: An ROI Approach (Amazon, web site)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Google Earth Design has been around for more than a year, but I’ve apparently missed it until now; the subject of good map design within Google Earth seems a laudable one. Ryan Strynatka writes about his blog, The Fiducial…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Off camping for a few days; here are a few links to tide you over: Roger Hart’s very good blog, GeoCarta, has moved to a new address and a new platform. The Sandusky Library Archives Research Center’s map collection is…  •  Continue reading this entry.

La Cartoteca points to two GIS manuals from the Pragmatic Programmers: Scott Davis’s GIS for Web Developers: Adding “Where” to your Web Applications, which came out last October; and the forthcoming (an online beta is available) Desktop GIS: Mapping the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

GIS: An Overview is a very basic introduction, but it seems to me that that sort of thing is necessary. Via About.com Geography. PC World’s How to Buy a GPS Device is slanted very heavily towards car-mounted GPS navigation systems,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The ESRI Mapping Center blog reports on a new book from ESRI Press: Designed Maps: A Sourcebook for GIS Users. It’s by Cynthia Brewer, who also wrote Designing Better Maps: A Guide for GIS Users (see previous entry). The…  •  Continue reading this entry.

On the Surveying, Mapping and GIS blog, Dave Smith recounts some GIS horror stories involving cadastral data errors — and the ludicrous things that are done to resolve them. “If you have discrepancies, data gaps, quality issues, other issues, I…  •  Continue reading this entry.

This is an article celebrating 40 years of service by Ed Maslonka, the cartographer of Grand Island, Nebraska, but it also offers a taste of what goes on, mapping-wise, in municipal planning departments….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Springfield Republican reports on a GIS project conducted by students of Turners Falls High School, which is part of ESRI’s U.S. Community Atlas program. The students produced a number of maps of the towns of Gill, Montague and…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Vector One asks why so many paper map products are still produced: Paper maps are still produced for a number of reasons. The primary reason that this is the case is due to the fact that paper maps are associated…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Today’s Globe and Mail has a profile of Roger Tomlinson, whose work with the Canadian government in the 1960s to develop the first national computerized GIS system has apparently earned him the title of “the father of GIS.”…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The GeoWeb 2007 conference, which takes place later this month and deals with “the convergence of Web technologies, XML, Web services, and GIS,” has a conference blog. The blog associated with Krygier and Wood’s excellent book, Making Maps (reviewed here),…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Alumni magazine Dartmouth Life has an article about geography and GIS at Dartmouth College, which “remains the only college in the Ivy League with a distinct geography department.”…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Former Intergraph CTO Peter Batty now has a blog: GeoThought. Via All Points Blog and Anything Geospatial….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Further to the previous report that the government of Canada would make digital topographic data available for free: here is the official announcement and here is the site where you can download that data. It’s called GeoGratis — cute. Via…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Two new blogs from the geospatial industry: ESRI Support Center News (via James, who notes that it “seems to be in a holding pattern”); and MapInfo’s Location Intelligence Blog (via All Points Blog)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Landsat Image Mosaic of Antarctica “combines nearly 1100 hand-selected Landsat satellite scenes that are being digitally woven together to create a single, seamless, cloud-free image of the Antarctic continent — the most detailed color representation of this vast…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Catholicgauze stirs the pot with an essay on the future of GIS and its increasing separation from Geography. Key graf: With [Geographic Information Science] focusing only on GIS the whole reason GIS exists, to study spatial phenomenon, is kicked out…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Geography Matters, the ESRI blog, has a post up on GIS and map libraries: “While not all institutions manage holdings of this size [the Library of Congress’s map collection], libraries and museums are realizing that a GIS can not only…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Canadian International Polar Year Internet Map Server maps the research stations, projects and other information associated with the the International Polar Year. The map interface takes a bit of time to load; the data are available as separate…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Stefan has discovered two brand-spanking-new blogs that have started up this very month: the Google Earth Hacks blog accompanies the site of the same name; MapWrapper.com is a GIS blog with an interest in earth sciences and remote sensing. Previously:…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’ve been following the news about ArcGIS Explorer, ESRI’s putative response to virtual globe software like Google Earth, since it was first announced (James Fee, for example, has blogged about it a lot), but I haven’t blogged about it…  •  Continue reading this entry.

First Chandu, now this: Ed Parsons is leaving the Ordnance Survey; he’s been their chief technology officer for more than five years….  •  Continue reading this entry.

GIS Monitor reviews a new book from ESRI Press, A to Z GIS: An Illustrated Dictionary of Geographic Information Systems. “With short, clear, and authoritative definitions of more than 1,800 terms written by more than 150 subject-matter experts, this…  •  Continue reading this entry.

GPS Tracklog has discovered a clearing house for U.S. Forest Service geodata, and talks about how that geodata can be used (hint: raster images can be viewed in most image viewers)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Conservation GeoPortal is an index of conservation maps and GIS datasets. No maps or data is available on the site itself, just searchable metadata; it points to stuff elsewhere online. More here. Via Maps-L….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Free GIS Data GeoBlog points to GIS data available for free online; it’s another project by Glenn Letham, whom we’ve heard of before: he’s also behind Anything Geospatial and GISUser.com, among other things. Via Cartography and GPS Tracklog….  •  Continue reading this entry.

QGIS, an open-source, multiplatform GIS application, has a blog by its developers. Via James Fee, who’s been covering QGIS for a while….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Two forthcoming books on the horizon: A to Z GIS: An Illustrated Dictionary of Geographic Information Systems (Amazon), a terminology guide from ESRI Press (press release); and Google Earth for Dummies, which is self-explanatory (via Google Earth Blog)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Peter Rukavina explores GIS applications for Mac OS X: “The last time I went looking for a desktop GIS application for my Mac all I found was the beast of a system that is GRASS. … Suddenly it seems that…  •  Continue reading this entry.

In a Directions article, Kevin Flanders argues that Canada’s disproportionately large contribution to open source GIS projects is a result of federal government funding, which he contrasts with U.S. government contracts to proprietary GIS vendors….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Via James and Glenn, I discover ESRI’s new public (and possibly collaborative) blog about the GIS industry, Geography Matters. Still in its early stages; ought to be interesting to see how it develops….  •  Continue reading this entry.

For people in the geospatial industry, ESRI is omnipresent; for people outside the industry, ESRI is scarcely on our radar, despite their dominance of the GIS software market. For those of us in the latter category, this Forbes article, profiling…  •  Continue reading this entry.

e_Perimetron is a new quarterly web journal, the focus of which is the application of geospatial technologies to old maps. The first issue, for example, has articles that transform old maps to conform to known coordinates, assign projections to portolans,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The city of McAllen, Texas has launched a GIS portal, The Monitor reports….  •  Continue reading this entry.

On Here Be Dragons, a list of resources for making custom maps for Garmin GPS receivers. On Very Spatial (via), a list of desktop GIS applications….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Directions reports that the keynote speaker at this week’s NEGIS conference was professor and author Mark Monmonier, which led me to his web site. Coincidentally, a copy of his classic book, How to Lie with Maps, arrived from Amazon this…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Think Globally, Act Locally: GIS and Data Visualization for Social Science and Public Policy Research, is a new textbook from ESRI Press. Authored by San Francisco State University urban studies professor Richard LeGates, the book is part of a project…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Via Ogle Earth, a collection of online GIS resources on the web site of the U.S. Army’s Topographic Engineering Center….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Making Maps: A Visual Guide to Map Design for GIS by John Krygier and Denis Wood Guilford Press, 2005. Softcover, 303 pp. ISBN 1-59385-200-2 I love this book. It’s just so neat. Although Making Maps is aimed at a GIS…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Jeff Thurston’s contribution to the debate over free geodata looks at the question of scale: if you want geospatial data to be free and updated regularly, consider the huge amount of territory that has to be mapped. Wired’s piece,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Here’s an article from itbusiness.ca about British Columbia’s Base Mapping and Geomatic Services branch, a part of the provincial government’s Integrated Land Management Bureau. The article covers some of the applications of the branch’s data at a fairly general level….  •  Continue reading this entry.

An article about GPS and geocaching in South Africa points out the extreme markup for GPS devices in that country: they cost twice as much as they do in the U.S.. The proposed INSPIRE directive, which would ostensibly standardize…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’m still up to my neck in Olympics nonsense, but I’ve got a few links to share with you that have been accumulating in my “post these soon” file. For all you tube map fanatics, a London Underground Map where…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Significant Blogspot outages rendered several favourite mapping blogs unavailable for portions of last weekend, including Cartography and GeoCarta. The city of North Platte, Nebraska, its police department, and surrounding Lincoln County all use different GIS and CAD software to generate…  •  Continue reading this entry.

At last weekend’s meeting of the American Historical Association, there was a session on GIS and History, the papers presented at which are available as PDF files (on the page, click on the name of the presenter). Historians regularly import…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A few quick links for the Map Site Directory: Via MapHist, I’ve learned about the British Cartographic Society and its journal, The Cartographic Journal. ArcDeveloper is a new blog that should be of interest to ESRI GIS developers. Via Spatially…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Australian government makes satellite imagery, geology maps (1:250,000 scale) and spatial data available free of charge. Via Glenn’s GISUser Weblog. See previous entry: Satellite Images and the Weather….  •  Continue reading this entry.

VanMap is a GIS viewer for the city of Vancouver, British Columbia; it’s got a surprising number of layers, more of which were added last September. (Use “VanMapLite” if you’re having browser difficulties with the main interface.) Via Vector One,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

GIS Monitor reviews Cynthia Brewer’s Designing Better Maps: “Brewer’s advice is authoritative, practical, and useful to novice and experienced mapmakers alike. She focuses on just a few key questions — how to design a map so that its layout…  •  Continue reading this entry.

SlashGISRS is a Slashdot-style community focusing on GIS and remote sensing. Looks very promising. (And it’s run by a Canadian non-profit organization: there are no limits to my country’s geographic conspiracy.)…  •  Continue reading this entry.

GIS Unshackled: A Guide to Open-Source Tools: a look at some of the open-source software packages, from databases to scalable vector graphics, that can be used in lieu of established commercial software. Via Very Spatial….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Tyler Mitchell talks about the behind-the-scenes work to process approximately 1,500 NOAA images from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and upload them to the Katrina Image Warehouse, using open-source software; the basics were up and running within 48 hours. Via…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Denver is going to be a busy place for map lovers this month. The International Map Collectors’ Society’s symposium takes place between September 18 and 23, and is held in conjunction with the Rocky Mountain Map Society’s antique map fair,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

I posted links to a lot of new blogs next month, but Cartography’s roundup of cartography and related blogs last week brought a grand total of seven more blogs to my attention. Plus, I was already aware of Ed Parsons’s…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Another blog to tell you about, and I can’t believe I missed reporting this one earlier: Spatially Adjusted, a GIS blog by James Fee, with a lot of stuff on ESRI and other software….  •  Continue reading this entry.

According to this article, the USGS’s shift from paper to digital maps is generating all sorts of potential problems. Some of them are typically bureaucratic: figuring out which agency is responsible for archiving and preserving which data (and paying for…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Marco Fioretti is looking for GIS PHP modules. He writes, “I have an urgent project to work on which includes processing GIS data with PHP, and I’d really like to start with something which is already tested.” My original post…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Speaking of Tyler Mitchell, he’s got an article on Directions explaining Chameleon, a collection of PHP scripts that, he says, allows non-programmers to build web mapping applications using MapServer through its MapScript API….  •  Continue reading this entry.

I’m overdue in posting this one, which comes to us thanks to James. Tyler Mitchell, whose Web Mapping Illustrated, a guide to free mapping software, is now shipping, had an article up on O’Reilly last month that I think serves…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A Directions magazine editorial, An Open Letter to GIS/Geospatial Software Companies, argues that between data providers providing mapping data to companies like Google, who then build hackable web tools, that are then used by GPS users to build custom maps…  •  Continue reading this entry.

“Yet his search for the dark, hidden ancestors of modern mapmaking illustrates something simple and true: maps — like technological progress itself — are not inherently benevolent.” The history of GIS is controversial: some argue it emerged from the military…  •  Continue reading this entry.

If you’re interested in social mapping (see previous entry), you shouldn’t miss this AP wire story about the work done by the University of Pennsylvania’s Cartographic Modeling Lab. The focus of the story is their work to correlate childhood obesity…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Another unfortunate result of the Ordnance Survey’s copyright on its mapping data: the Journal of Maps announced last week that, because of the Ordnance Survey’s restrictive licencing, “we are currently unable to accept any maps based upon OS data.” (See…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Mapping Hacks has a report on the Forum on Open Geodata that took place earlier this month (see previous entry), where the argument was put forth that the Ordnance Survey should open up its data for the economic spinoff benefits…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Yesterday’s Guardian had a piece exploring the dichotomy between ground-level, do-it-yourself, open-source mapping projects done by people walking about with GPS units, and the massive geodata owned by government agencies. So why would anyone want to make their own map,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

More on the attempt to produce GIS data for the UK independent of Crown copyright (see previous entry: there will be a Forum on Open Geodata on April 14 in London; see the link for speakers and details. From the…  •  Continue reading this entry.

GRASS, the open-source GIS software, has been available for Mac OS X before; on Friday, OpenOSX announced GrassPro, which, in addition to GRASS 6.0.0, adds several related utilities. Panther and X11 required….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Boston Phoenix has an interview with the manager of the Boston Redevelopment Authority’s Office of Digital Cartography and GIS, Carolyn Bennett; the discussion ranges from GIS in general, to the nature of the Office’s work, to one of their…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Richard writes to draw our attention to a new online scholarly journal, the Journal of Maps, which launched last year and had their first issue this month. From their about page: The Journal of Maps is a new inter-disciplinary online,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

OpenStreetMap “is an effort to produce free (CC-licensed) streetmaps of the world.” It’s in “pre-pre-pre alpha” at the moment. The idea is to get free data by running around with a GPS, analysis of aerial photography or other methods since…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The University of Openness (previous entry) has a new project to make copyright-free street maps of London; the page explains the details and MO, but it looks like it’ll involve an awful lot of GPS tracing and GIS data processing…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Wired has a story about how GIS is being used to increase voter turnout. Now, get-out-the-vote organizers have started overlaying information from registered voter lists, attaching data such as voter history, party registration or time in the community to every…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The Ordnance Survey is developing a new mapping system that will have a profound impact on everything from insurance rates to trip planning. The key? Something called a toid, says the Grauniad: The word toid does not yet appear in…  •  Continue reading this entry.

MAPublisher 6.0 was announced today. It’s a collection of Adobe Illustrator plug-ins that allow you to import GIS data into that software. Manipulating proper data with a proper graphics program, apparently. (via MacCentral)…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Image_GIS is a PHP package that allows you to generate on-the-fly maps in PNG or JPEG image formats from geographical datasets. Don’t worry if you don’t know what this means: essentially it means you can transform raw GIS data into…  •  Continue reading this entry.

“[D]atabases of all types of crime, plotted on detailed local maps, have become a powerful new crime-fighting tool,” says a BBC report on the use of mapping technology by police in Britain. One example given: tracking arson by teens in…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Non-profit community groups do not have the same research resources that governments and corporate entities do. As far as mapping and GIS data is concerned, the New York Public Interest Research Group is trying to change that with its Community…  •  Continue reading this entry.

North American geospatial data is available free from a couple of government sites. For the U.S., there’s the USGS GEO-DATA Explorer (via MetaFilter), and, for Canada, there’s GeoGratis….  •  Continue reading this entry.