The Map Room

Google’s Street View has launched in 11 Canadian cities: Calgary, Kitchener and Waterloo, Halifax, Montréal, Ottawa, Québec, Toronto, Vancouver, and Squamish and Whistler (these last two almost certainly for the upcoming Olympics). Equally large cities like Edmonton, London (Ontario), Hamilton and Winnipeg are apparently not yet available. News coverage: CBC News, National Post. See also Google Maps Mania and Google Earth Blog.

Also today, Street View also came to Prague (Google Earth Blog, Google Maps Mania).

Speaking of collaborative mapping projects, here are a couple of links:

• Richard Eriksson reports on a meeting of the Vancouver Public Space Network’s Mapping and Wayfinding group. “They are a group of mapping enthusiasts who want to organize collaboratively mapping Vancouver’s public spaces and have some interesting ideas on how to do so, including a web service with a REST interface, but also hand-drawn maps.” Thanks to Richard Akerman for the link.
• Efforts to conserve the San Pedro River in Arizona may be aided by a local volunteer mapping project, the Arizona Republic reports. “To draw the map, hundreds of volunteers converged on the river last summer with notebooks, cameras and GPS units. On foot and horseback, the volunteers charted lengths of the river and used the GPS units to mark the start and end of areas where water flowed. The timing allowed surveyors to track the river during critical summer base-flow conditions.” Thanks to James Fee for the link.

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, where Jeff Thurston notes, “Of note is the inclusion of property values. … By comparison, in Europe, it is difficult to obtain information like this related to the neighbourhood.”