In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

InfoQ have published a talk by Gary Gale (@vicchi) called "The Ubiquitous Digital Map (Abridged)" giving a half hour potted history of the digital map. Worth a watch (but not as full screen as you'll miss the slides!) as knowing where we came from might help to understand where we are going.

Bloggage update: When compared to the local Open Street Map, a 1610 map of the Cambridge UK region from the Harvard University Library will show differences in the distribution of settlements, roads and rivers. Towns important 400 years ago are either less so or absent altogether, and Cambridge doesn't rank among them! Two maps and a comparative table and further details are described in this beautifully drawn ancient map. 

This news story appeared on the BBC today - a team from the University of Portsmouth have mapped the location of bombs dropped on London during World War Two. The information is available via an interactive map or android app.

Bloggage update: I'm a big fan of the British Library (London UK), whose an amazing array of old maps they just finished georeferencing via crowd-sourcing. These maps are now linked to Old Maps Online, and being an amateur medievalist myself, I found a 1610 map of "Cambridgshire : described with the deuision of the hundreds, the townes situation, with the armes of the colleges of that famous vniuersiti and also the armes of all such princes and noblemen as haue heertofore borne the honorable tytles & dignities of the Earldome of Cambridge [sic]" - read on for little map R&R (restoration and reading) around my in-laws' home village.

Maybe Twitter is useful after all ;-) Through it I learned about the GWHAT 'Global World History ATlas' project.

Their vision: "GWHAT's goal is to improve the world's understanding of how we arrived where we are by providing an animated, map-based, storytelling environment. The web is full of wonderful map content provided by amazing map producers. GWHAT aims to make this content easier to find, easier to contrast and compare, and easier to customize. Historic information should not be captive to data formats, copyrights, or subscription barriers."

They don't seem to offer much map storytelling content yet.

Google have recently launched a new project called the “World Wonders Project”.

The Google World Wonders Project is a platform that brings world heritage sites of the modern and ancient world online. Using Google’s Street View technology, 3D modelling, photos, videos and in-depth information, you will be able to explore the world’s treasures from your classroom.

There are many interesting geographical locations available to explore on the site, including the Banks of the Seine in Paris, Yosemite National Park in the USA and the Dorset & East Devon Coast.

Viewing geographical locations as they are today can help your students to visualise and understand the significance of the subjects they’re studying.

Google is also offering three free and easy-to-use Geography resources, available to download from the site, which are designed to support teachers in delivering Geography in a fun, engaging and thought-provoking way. The resources are clear, well-structured and offer many ideas for using the Google World Wonders Project site in the classroom. The suggested activities are relevant for a variety of different locations and could be a useful inspiration for a range of geography topics.

Bloggage update: Exprodat published a free eBook: Why use GIS in petroleum?, an excellent state-of-play as well as good industry marketing to augment their impressive blog. One of their figures similar to one I published 25 years ago, led me to briefly look at what GIS looked like in oil&gas a generation ago.

Bloggage update: Two year review of a personal project that shows what free map data to hang sketch maps on, and a little tinkering to add historic wealth data, can achieve to illustrate almost 1000 yrs of geo-economics. Three key elements are: a) a geographic unit that stays constant, b) people who indefatigably document and update such important information, and c) ground truthing i.e. knowing & QCíng the data in order to put information in context.

Bloggage update: Continuing the ongoing (re)discovery of cools maps for the rest of us, here are two I found on Facebook from my friends Christophe Staff in Belgium and Aidos Malybayev in Kazakhstan. They show a map I helped with to post Templar sites on an embedded Google Map, and a localised derivative of same for  Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. As I said before, this blog is dedicated to the weird and wonderful ways we find to display information from work through current affairs to the personal, quickly and easily on web maps... and not unlikely after hours!

Here's the recent Google-related geonews.

From official sources:

• Two entries on Google's updated Google Maps for Android to version 5.7, including several new features:  transit navigation (beta),  updated directions, improved search suggest, photo viewer for Places pages, downloading map areas for offline use, a scale bar and a measuring tool
• Google added ten of thousands of new 3D buildings to Berkeley, California; Cologne, Germany; and The Hague, in the Netherlands
• Google shared a summary of the geospatial content at the Google I/O 2011 conference
• StreetView is now available for Monaco

From other sources:

• The GEB introduces Tribus Organum, an Illustrated history of the world using Google Earth
• The GEB also mentions the 2011 Tour de France in Google Earth