In+ersec+ion for Spatial People

A week ago MapBox released the excellent and nicely designed 2013 OpenStreetMap Data Report. Here's the blog entry about the report. Really worth looking at the report, even if it's just for appreciating its superb presentation.

From the entry: "We've looked back on the project's 10 years in the making, the skyrocket growth to over 1 million users, 21 million miles, and 78 million buildings, and tried for the first time to tell the story of OpenStreetMap as a whole in data. We have traced through OpenStreetMap's 67,629,368 roads and tallied up the incredible sum of 21 million miles - that's 40 years of driving at 60 miles per hour."

Other OSM-related news:

• The beta version of iD 1.1, tuning OpenStreetMap editing
• Here's a scientific article named Towards generating highly detailed 3D CityGML models from OpenStreetMap

Slashdot discusses a story named Interpreting Global Flight Maps.

Their summary: "Five experts including: artist, environmentalist, aviation consultant, data visualization expert and philosopher interpret a flight map showing global flights. While the imagery of the visualization is intriguing, the interpretations are particularly interesting and show how individual background and experience impact they way they view the data."

It's clearly not the first time we mention airplane flights maps, we had previous stories such as Flight Paths and Noise Mapping, Near Real-time Flights over the U.S., OpenFlights database and more.

We mentioned TanDEM-X before, TerraSAR-X too, and global DEMs like SRTM-DEM and ASTER GDEM, and there's going to be a new major global DEM available in 2014, WorldDEM.

From the DM article: "The TanDEM-X mission is to generate a global digital elevation model - WorldDEM - of unprecedented quality, accuracy and coverage. This DEM is intended to be the replacement dataset for SRTM and will be available in 2014 for the Earth’s entire land surface - pole to pole. The accuracy of the WorldDEM will surpass that of any satellite-based elevation model available today and will have the following unique features:

• Vertical accuracy of 2m (relative) and 10m (absolute)
• 12m x 12m raster
• Global homogeneity
• Highly consistent dataset as a result of an initial global data collection window of 2.5 years and the opportunity to continue to collect locally beyond the initial collection period
• No need for ground control information due to the high geometric precision of German sensors "

I've been asked to review documents pertaining to the UN initiative on Global Geospatial Information Management (GGIM), which led me to their country reports, that acts as excellent summaries of the state of geospatial in a country. While the content of the reports varies widely from one country to another, they are pretty informative.

Amongst the 2012 reports: Canada, Greece, Nepal, Spain, Fiji, Japan, The Netherlands, and several others

Amongst the 2011 reports: Australia, Cameroun, Egypt, Germany, Israel, Namibia, Palestine, U.K., U.S. and several others

From the about UN-GGIM: "The UN initiative on Global Geospatial Information Management (GGIM) aims at playing a leading role in setting the agenda for the development of global geospatial information and to promote its use to address key global challenges. It provides a forum to liaise and coordinate among Member States, and between Member States and international organizations."

The Spatial Law and Policy shares an interesting entry named Will A "Geo-Divide" Arise Between Nations In The Future?

The introduction: "The benefits that a ‘location-enabled’ society can provide for economic growth, technological innovation, improved government services and an engaged citizenry are becoming increasingly clear.  However it is important to recognize that a healthy geospatial ecosystem needs consistent and transparent laws and policies that support the collection, use, storage, transfer, analysis and display of spatially-enabled data from various public and private sources. Such a legal and policy framework must be broad-based, cutting across both legal domains as well as technology platforms.  In the absence of such a framework internationally, I believe we are likely to see a ‘geo-divide’ between nations over the next ten years." 

​My guess is that access to geospatial technology will be less of a problem than the legal and governmental context.

The AGISRS list made me aware of Geo-Wiki.org, a crowdsourcing effort aimed at validating global land cover.

From their main page: "The Geo-Wiki Project is a global network of volunteers who wish to help improve the quality of global land cover maps. Since large differences occur between existing global land cover maps, current ecosystem and land-use science lacks crucial accurate data (e.g. to determine the potential of additional agricultural land available to grow crops in Africa). Volunteers are asked to review hotspot maps of global land cover disagreement and determine, based on what they actually see in Google Earth and their local knowledge, if the land cover maps are correct or incorrect. Their input is recorded in a database, along with uploaded photos, to be used in the future for the creation of a new and improved global land cover map."

Via @Thierry_G I learned about this world map of geospatial conferences to be held in 2012 provided by Quarry One Eleven. You can filter the conferences by month.

I know VerySpatial provide a calendar of geospatial events (compatible with the iCal standard) since 2006.

Anyone's aware of similar global calendars of geospatial events?

This is major news for anyone using DEM datasets. Here's about a new elevation dataset named Global Multi-resolution Terrain Elevation Data 2010 - GMTED2010. Here's the USGS report about GMTED2010 and the description and download site on USGS's EROS.

From the article: "The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) have released an updated and more accurate global elevation model that pulls data from Digital Terrain Elevation Data (DTED®) from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM); Canadian elevation data; SPOT 5 Reference 3D data; data from NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat); and updated Antarctica and Greenland terrain models. This new elevation data called Global Multi-resolution Terrain Elevation Data 2010 (GMTED2010),  replaces the thirty year old GTOPO30 terrain model.

GMTED2010 is a suite of seven raster data products: minimum elevation, maximum elevation, mean elevation, median elevation, standard deviation of elevation, systematic subsample, and breakline emphasis. The spatial resolution of GMTED2010 ranges from 30, 15 and 7.5 arc-seconds (approximately 1 kilometer, 500 meters and 250 meters, respectively)."

You might be interested in the ASTER GDEM and the SRTM-DEM CGIAR-CSI v4 datasets, amongst other DEMs.

Over the past week, I read all the content of National Geographic's '7 Billion' iPad app. I found it of excellent quality and pretty interesting. Interesting enough for me to spend some time sharing my thoughts about it with you. 'Geography' is at the core of the topic and content of the app. The iPad app is free "for a limited time", so I encourage you to download it right away (provided you have an iPad of course).

But first, here's the official description: "National Geographic magazine presents 7 Billion: How your world will change - to coincide with the arrival of the 7 billionth human being to our world. This app explores the challenges of a growing human population in a world of limited resources with informative videos, interactive maps, in-depth articles, and stunning photography. 

Featured content includes….

• How big is 7 Billion? An insightful video of the demographic trends that got us here today and how it will impact us tomorrow.
• Birth of a New Brazil: How big families are out, to the credit of strong-willed women—and the steamy soaps that inspired them.
• The Face of Seven Billion Interactive: Tap on the “typical face” to find out who the most typical human is
• Rift in Paradise: As the global population increases Africa’s Albertine Rift gives us a glimpse of what is at stake in the decades ahead.
• Bangladesh: See how resourceful residents of this country refuse to give in to rising seas
• Food Ark: Explore how preserving heirlooms seeds and breeds are crucial if we hope to feed our hungry world.
• And to be incorporated into the app in December 2011, Cities are the Solution: They may be the best way to lift people from poverty and preserve the environment."

And now my notes:

• The app contains several beautiful photos with captions, quite a few slightly interactive maps, about three short videos, and about a hundred pages of articles to read
• The articles are generally very well written, documented and quite pertinent, well worth the time
• The design is the app is beautiful, and so are the maps, but in both cases, design takes precedence on usability. Ideally, maps must be beautifully designed -and- usable
• The surprise of the first section, is that despite population having increased exponentially in in the past decades, most scenarios indicate we'll stabilize and start to decrease in the middle of this century. In fact, population is even already on a decreasing course in a lot of parts of the world, notable exceptions are India and Africa, so the problem is not population, it's resources, mainly food and energy (both are linked of course (population <=> resources & food <=> energy), everything is related, and as we know in geography, near things are more related than distant things)
• The second section, focusing on Brazil, shows that you don't even need laws to reduce family sizes, you need "modernity"
• The section on Africa is insightful, and shows that we're not safe from additional Rwanda-type wars, since population is not evenly distributed and so are resources. When people starve, they don't care about "national natural reserves" and are willing to pillage anything they can to survive (this reminds me of Collapse, by Jared Diamond)
• The section on Bangladesh is reassuring. When we don't have access to much, we do with what we have and imagination helps, but be ready to move frequently and systematically adapt to new situations. To be bold, I'm not sure we're that flexible in the "modern" world
• There's a section on oceans acidification, dubbed "climate change's lesser-known evil twin". Oceans are degrading at a dramatic rate, mostly because we don't do anything and continue with our unsustainable practices, and we're going to start paying the price real soon 
• There's also a section on food production, but I don't remember reading anything surprising in there
• The last part of the app, titled "Cities are the Solution" is not yet available (next month), I will certainly read it once it becomes available

In short, it's a great informative app that I can only recommend. It's well documented, beautiful and pertinent. Anyone else has comments?

On the same topic and in addition to what we already shared, O'Reilly has an entry on visualizations of 7 billion humans.

In June 2009 we announced the release by the METI and NASA of the free global topography dataset named "ASTER GDEM", and Version 2 with significant improvements has just been released earlier this month.

From the article: "The improved version of the map adds 260,000 additional stereo-pair images to improve coverage. It features improved spatial resolution, increased horizontal and vertical accuracy, more realistic coverage over water bodies and the ability to identify lakes as small as 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) in diameter. The map is available online to users everywhere at no cost. [...] The ASTER data cover 99 percent of Earth's landmass and span from 83 degrees north latitude to 83 degrees south. Each elevation measurement point in the data is 98 feet (30 meters) apart."

Here's a direct link to the ASTER GDEM website. See also previous news regarding ASTER GDEM. Of course, if you have an interesting in the ASTER GDEM, make sure you know about the SRTM-DEM CGIAR-CSI Version 4 too.