Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

April 17, 2012

How can we get our map colours right?

Filed under: Graphics,Mapping,Maps,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 7:11 pm

How can we get our map colours right? How open journalism helped us get better

Watch the debate as it unfolds over Twitter with argument for and against color schemes, plus examples!

Did the map get better, worse, about the same?

The Guardian writes:

How can you get the colour scales right on maps? It’s something we spend a lot of time thinking about here on the Datablog – and you may notice a huge variety of ones we try out.

This isn’t just design semantics – using the wrong colours can mean your maps are completely inaccessible to people with colour blindness, for instance and actually obscure what you’re trying to do.

It’s distinct to problems expertly faced by the Guardian graphics team – who have a lot of experience of making maps just right.

But on the blog, making a Google Fusion map in a hurry, do we get it right?

What avenues for public contribution do you allow for your topic maps?

April 11, 2012

Timeline Maps

Filed under: Mapping,Maps,Time,Timelines — Patrick Durusau @ 6:17 pm

Timeline Maps

From the post:

Mapping time has long been an interest of cartographers. Visualizing historical events in a timeline or chart or diagram is an effective way to show the rise and fall of empires and states, religious history, and important human and natural occurrences. We have over 100 examples in the Rumsey Map Collection, ranging in date from 1770 to 1967. We highlight a few below.

Sebastian Adams’ 1881 Synchronological Chart of Universal History is 23 feet long and shows 5,885 years of history, from 4004 B.C. to 1881 A.D. It is the longest timeline we have seen. The recently published Cartographies of Time calls it “nineteenth-century America’s surpassing achievement in complexity and synthetic power.” In the key to the map, Adams states that timeline maps enable learning and comprehension “through the eye to the mind.”

Below is a close up detail of a very small part of the chart: (click on the title or the image to open up the full chart)

Stunning visuals.

Our present day narratives aren’t any less arrogant than those of the 19th century but the distance is great enough for us to laugh at their presumption. Which unlike our own, isn’t “true.” 😉

Worth all the time you can spend with the maps. Likely to provoke insights into how you have viewed “history” as well as how you view current “events.”

Open Street Map GPS users mapped

Filed under: GPS,Mapping,Maps,Open Street Map — Patrick Durusau @ 6:15 pm

Open Street Map GPS users mapped

From the post:

Open Street Map is the data source that keeps on giving. Most recently, the latest release has been a dump of GPS data from its contributors. These are the track files from Sat Nav systems which they users have sourced for the raw data behind OSM.

It’s a huge dataset: 55GB and 2.8bn items. And Guardian Datastore Flickr group user Steven Kay decided to try to visualise it.

This is the result – and it’s only an random sample of the whole. The heatmap shows a random sample of 1% of the points and their distribution, to show where GPS is used to upload data to OSM.

There are just short of 2.8 billion points, so the sample is nearly 28 million points. Red cells have the most points, blue cells have the fewest.

Great data set on its own but possibly the foundation for something even more interesting.

The intelligence types, who can’t analyze a small haystack effectively, want to build a bigger one: Building a Bigger Haystack.

Why not use GPS data such as this to create an “Intelligence Big Data Mining Test?” That is we assign significance to patterns in the data and see of the intelligence side can come up with the same answers. We can tell them what the answers are because they must still demonstrate how they got there, not just the answer.

April 9, 2012

Where am I, who am I?

Filed under: Mapping,Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 4:57 pm

Where am I, who am I?

Pete Warden writes:

“Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.”

Where am I right now? Depending on who I’m talking to, I’m in SoMa, San Francisco, South Park, the City, or the Bay Area. What neighborhood is my apartment in? Craigslist had it down as Castro when it was listed. Long-time locals often describe it as Duboce Triangle, but people less concerned with fine differences lump it into the Lower Haight, since I’m only two blocks from Haight Street.

When I first started working with geographic data, I imagined this was a problem to be solved. There had to be a way to cut through the confusion and find a true definition, a clear answer to the question of “Where am I?”.

What I’ve come to realize over the last few years is that geography is a folksonomy. Sure, there’s political boundaries, but the only ones that people pay much attention to are states and countries. City limits don’t have much effect on people’s descriptions of where they live. Just take a look at this map of Los Angeles’ official boundaries:

Pete is onto a more general principle.

Semantics are folksonomy, the precision of which varies depending upon the reason for your interest and your community.

Biblical scholars split hairs, sorry, try to correct errors committed by others, by citing imagined nuances of languages used thousands of years ago. To the average person on the street, the Bible may as well have been written in King James English. Not that one is more precise than the other, just a different community and different habits for reading the text.

The question which community do you hail from and for what purpose are you asking about semantics? We can short-circuit a lot of discussion by recognition that communities vary in their semantics. Each to his/her own.

April 7, 2012

Rediscovering the World: Gridded Cartograms of Human and Physical Space

Filed under: Geographic Data,Mapping,Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 7:43 pm

Rediscovering the World: Gridded Cartograms of Human and Physical Space by Benjamin Hennig.

Abstract:

‘We need new maps’ is the central claim made in this thesis. In a world increasingly influenced by human action and interaction, we still rely heavily on mapping techniques that were invented to discover unknown places and explore our physical environment. Although the traditional concept of a map is currently being revived in digital environments, the underlying mapping approaches are not capable of making the complexity of human-environment relationships fully comprehensible.

Starting from how people can be put on the map in new ways, this thesis outlines the development of a novel technique that stretches a map according to quantitative data, such as population. The new maps are called gridded cartograms as the method is based on a grid onto which a density-equalising cartogram technique is applied. The underlying grid ensures the preservation of an accurate geographic reference to the real world. It allows the gridded cartograms to be used as basemaps onto which other information can be mapped. This applies to any geographic information from the human and physical environment. As demonstrated through the examples presented in this thesis, the new maps are not limited to showing population as a defining element for the transformation, but can show any quantitative geospatial data, such as wealth, rainfall, or even the environmental conditions of the oceans. The new maps also work at various scales, from a global perspective down to the scale of urban environments.

The gridded cartogram technique is proposed as a new global and local map projection that is a viable and versatile alternative to other conventional map projections. The maps based on this technique open up a wide range of potential new applications to rediscover the diverse geographies of the world. They have the potential to allow us to gain new perspectives through detailed cartographic depictions.

I found the reference to this dissertation in Fast Thinking and Slow Thinking Visualisation and thought it merited a high profile.

If you are interested in mapping, the history of mapping, or proposals for new ways to think about mapping projections, you will really appreciate this work.

Fast Thinking and Slow Thinking Visualisation

Filed under: Graphics,Maps,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 7:43 pm

Fast Thinking and Slow Thinking Visualisation

James Cheshire writes:

Last week I attended the Association of American Geographers Annual Conference and heard a talk by Robert Groves, Director of the US Census Bureau. Aside the impressiveness of the bureau’s work I was struck by how Groves conceived of visualisations as requiring either fast thinking or slow thinking. Fast thinking data visualisations offer a clear message without the need for the viewer to spend more than a few seconds exploring them. These tend to be much simpler in appearance, such as my map of the distance that London Underground trains travel during rush hour.

Betraying my reader-response background, I would argue that fast/slow nature of maps may well be found in the reader.

Particularly if the reader is also a customer paying for a visualisation of data or a visual interface for a topic map.

It makes little difference whether I find the interface/visualisation fast/slow, intuitive or not. It makes a great deal of difference how the customer finds it.

A quick example: The moving squares with lines that re-orient themselves. Would not even be my last choice for an interface. And I have used very large tomes that have cross-references from page to page that are the equivalent of those moving square displays.

The advantage I see in the manual equivalent is that I can refer back to the prior visualisation. True, I can try to retrace my steps on the moving graphic but that is unlikely.

An improvement to the moving boxes I don’t like? Make each change a snapshot that I can recall, perhaps displayed as a smallish line of snapshots.

Some of those snapshots may be fast or slow, when I display them to you. Hard to say until you see them.

Explore Geographic Coverage in Mapping Wikipedia

Filed under: Mapping,Maps,Ontopia,Wikipedia — Patrick Durusau @ 7:42 pm

Explore Geographic Coverage in Mapping Wikipedia

From the post:

TraceMedia, in collaboration with the Oxford Internet Institute, maps language use across Wikipedia in an interactive, fittingly named Mapping Wikipedia.

Simply select a language, a region, and the metric that you want to map, such as word count, number of authors, or the languages themselves, and you’ve got a view into “local knowledge production and representation” on the encyclopedia. Each dot represents an article with a link to the Wikipedia article. For the number of dots on the map, a maximum of 800,000, it works surprisingly without a hitch, other than the time it initially takes to load articles.

You need to follow the link to: Who represents the Arab world online? Mapping and measuring local knowledge production and representation in the Middle East and North Africa. The researchers are concerned with fairness and balance of coverage of the Arab world.

Rather than focusing on Wikipedia, an omnipresent resource on the WWW, I would rather have a mapping of who originates the news feeds more generally? Rather than focusing on who is absent. Moreover, I would ask why the Arab OPEC members have not been more effective at restoring balance in the news media?

April 5, 2012

Beautiful visualisation tool transforms maps into works of art

Filed under: Mapping,Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 3:38 pm

Beautiful visualisation tool transforms maps into works of art: Introducing Stamen maps, cartography with aesthetics at its heart

From the post:

Stamen maps, the second stage of the City Tracking project funded by the Knight News Challenge has just been released for public use.

This installment consists of three beautifully intricate mapping styles, which use OpenStreetMap data to display any area of the world* in a new and highly stylised layout.

Take a look at each of the designs below. You can click and drag the maps to view other locations.

More tools for better looking maps!

April 4, 2012

OpenStreetMap versus Google maps

Filed under: Mapping,Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 3:32 pm

OpenStreetMap versus Google maps

From the post:

Travelling to Sarajevo showed the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Lucy Chambers the overwhelming reach of crowdsourced open data

Lucy says nice things about both OpenStreetMap and Google maps.

I mention it as encouragement to try crowdsourced data in your semantic solutions where appropriate.

Depending on the subject, we are all parts of “crowds” of one sort or another.

March 29, 2012

Mobile App Developer Competition (HaptiMap)

Filed under: Interface Research/Design,Mapping,Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 6:39 pm

Mobile App Developer Competition (HaptiMap)

From the website:

Win 4000 Euro, a smartphone or a tablet!

This competition is open for mobile apps, which demonstrate designs that can be used by a wide range of users and in a wide range of situations (also on the move). The designs can make use of visual (on-screen) elements, but they should also make significant use of the non-visual interaction channels. The competition is open both for newly developed apps as well as existing apps who are updated using the HaptiMap toolkit. To enter the competition, the app implementation must make use of the HaptiMap toolkit. Your app can rely on existing toolkit modules, but it is also possible extend or add appropriate modules (in line with the purpose of HaptiMap) into the toolkit.

…

Important dates:

The competition closes 15th of June 17.00 CET 2012. The winners will be announced at the HAID’12 workshop (http://www.haid.ws) 23-24 August 2012, Lund, Sweden.

In case you aren’t familiar with HaptiMap:

What is HaptiMap?

HaptiMap is an EU project which aims at making maps and location based services more accessible by using several senses like vision, hearing, and, particularly, touch. Enabling haptic access to mainstream map and LBS data allows more people to use them in a number of different environmental or individual circumstances. For example, when navigating in low-visibility (e.g., bright sunlight) and/or high noise environments, preferring to concentrate on riding your bike, sightseeing and/or listening to sounds, or when your visual and/or auditory senses are impaired (e.g., due to age).

If you think about it, what is being proposed is standard mapping but not using the standard (visual) channel.

March 11, 2012

Old-style mapping provides a new take on our poverty maps

Filed under: Mapping,Maps,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 8:10 pm

Old-style mapping provides a new take on our poverty maps

John Burn-Murdoch writes:

Mapping data is tricky. The normal approach – as we used with our poverty maps today – is to create a chloropleth – a map where areas are coloured. But there is another way – and it’s quite old. This intricate visualisation by Oliver O’Brien (via spatialanalysis.co.uk) illustrates the demographics of housing throughout Britain in a style dating back to the 19th Century. Echoing the work of philanthropist Charles Booth, the map highlights groups of buildings rather than block-areas. The result is a much more detailed visualisation, allowing viewers to drill down almost to household level.

The meaningful display of data isn’t a new task. I suspect there are a number of visualization techniques that lie in library stacks waiting to be re-discovered.

March 8, 2012

Fast and slow visualization

Filed under: Graphics,Maps,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 9:44 pm

Fast and slow visualization by Nathan Yau.

Nathan point out:

James Cheshire ponders the difference between fast and slow thinking maps, and the dying breed of the latter.

I wondered in Is That A Graph In Your Cray? if “interactivity” with data is a real requirement.

In the sense of being one that makes sense for any analytical project.

Take the alleged role of “Twitter” in the Arab Spring, a “conclusion” driven by easy and superficial access to data.

Deeper, slower analysis has since established that trade unions had been creating social networks (the traditional kind) for years and so when Twitter went dark, so what? The traditional social networks were in place and far more robust that a technological marvel available mostly to Western reporters.

Of course, the data “analysts” who touted the Twitter conclusion have gone onto other superficial analysis and conclusions, probably in the US election cycle by this point. At least they are not polluting international events for the moment, or perhaps not as much.

February 28, 2012

Map your Twitter Friends

Filed under: Mapping,Maps,Tweets — Patrick Durusau @ 10:44 pm

Map your Twitter Friends by Nathan Yau.

From the post:

You’d think that this would’ve been done by now, but this simple mashup does exactly what the title says. Just connect your Twitter account and the people you follow popup, with some simple clustering so that people don’t get all smushed together in one location.

Too bad the FBI’s social media mining contract will be secret. Wonder how much freely available capabilities will be?

Security requirements will drive up the cost. Like secure installations where the computers have R/W DVDs installed.

Not that I carry a brief for any government, other than paying ones, but I do dislike incompetence, on any side.

Really old maps online

Filed under: Mapping,Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 10:44 pm

Really old maps online by Nathan Yau.

From the post:

Maps have been around for a long time, but you might not know it looking online. It can be hard to find them. Old Maps Online, a project by The Great Britain Historical GIS Project and Klokan Technologies GmbH, Switzerland, is a catalog of just that.

I do wonder when the organization of information in its various forms will be recognized as maps? Or for that matter, visualized as maps?

February 21, 2012

Maps with R

Filed under: Mapping,Maps,R — Patrick Durusau @ 8:01 pm

Maps with R (I)

From the post:

This is the first post of a short series to show some code I have learnt to produce maps with R.

Some time ago I found this infographic from The New York Times (via this page) and I wondered how a multivariate choropleth map could be produced with R. Here is the code I have arranged to show the results of the last Spanish general elections in a similar fashion.

Which was followed by:

Maps with R (II)

In my last post I described how to produce a multivariate choropleth map with R. Now I will show how to create a map from raster files. One of them is a factor which will group the values of the other one. Thus, once again, I will superpose several groups in the same map.

What do you want to map today?

February 16, 2012

Metrography: London Reshaped to Match the Classic Tube Map

Filed under: Mapping,Maps,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 6:58 pm

Metrography: London Reshaped to Match the Classic Tube Map.

From the post:

In Metrography [looksgood.de], interaction design students Benedikt Groß [looksgood.de] and Bertrand Clerc [bertrandclerc.com] and presents us with an alternative view on London. What if the street map was reshaped according to the positions of the tube stations as placed on the Tube map?

The result is a ‘warped’ or ‘morphed’ map of London, that highlights the discrepancy between the stylized metro map and the geographically correct depiction. The resulting high-resolution prints can be viewed online in all detail.

I am not sure I agree there is a “geographically correct depiction” of London or any other locale. Depends on whose “geography” you are using. We are so schooled in some depictions being “correct,” that we fail to speak up when lines of advantage/disadvantage are being drawn. That is “just the way things fall on the map,” no personal motive involved. Right.

Topic maps are one way to empower alternative views, geographic or otherwise.

February 12, 2012

New mapping tools bring public health surveillance to the masses

Filed under: Collation,Health care,Mapping,Maps,Marketing — Patrick Durusau @ 5:13 pm

New mapping tools bring public health surveillance to the masses by Kim Krisberg.

From the post:

Many of us probably look into cyberspace and are overwhelmed with its unwieldy amounts of never-ending information. John Brownstein, on the other hand, sees points on a map.

Brownstein is the co-founder of HealthMap, a team of researchers, epidemiologists and software developers at Children’s Hospital Boston who use online sources to track disease outbreaks and deliver real-time surveillance on emerging public health threats. But instead of depending wholly on traditional methods of public health data collection and official reports to create maps, HealthMap enlists helps from, well, just about everybody.

“We recognized that collecting data in more traditional ways can sometimes be difficult and the flow of information can take a while,” said Brownstein, also an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. “So, the question was how to collect data outside the health care structure to serve public health and the general public.”

HealthMap, which debuted in 2006, scours the Internet for relevant information, aggregating data from online news services, eyewitness reports, professional discussion rooms and official sources. The result? The possibility to map disease trends in places where no public health or health care infrastructures even exist, Brownstein told me. And because HealthMap works non-stop, continually monitoring, sorting and visualizing online information, the system can also serve as an early warning system for disease outbreaks.

You need to read this post and then visit HealthMap.

Collating information from diverse sources is a mainstay of epidemiology.

Topic maps are an effort to bring the benefits of collating information from diverse sources to other fields.

(I first saw this on Beyond Search.)

February 3, 2012

Great Maps with ggplot2

Filed under: Ggplot2,Graphics,Mapping,Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 5:03 pm

Great Maps with ggplot2

I have mentioned ggplot2 before but this item caught my eye because of its skillful use with a map of cycle tours of London.

Not that I intend to take a cycle tour of London any time soon but it occurs to me that creating maps to resturants, entertainment, etc., from conference sites would be a good use of it. Coupled with a topic map, as the conference progresses, reviews/tweets about those locations could become available to other participants.

Other geographic locations/information could be plotted as well.

January 11, 2012

Designing Google Maps

Filed under: Geographic Information Retrieval,Mapping,Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 8:07 pm

Designing Google Maps by Nathan Yau.

From the post:

Google Maps is one of Google’s best applications, but the time, energy, and thought put into designing it often goes unnoticed because of how easy it is to use, for a variety of purposes. Willem Van Lancker, a user experience and visual designer for Google Maps, describes the process of building a map application — color scheme, icons, typography, and “Googley-ness” — that practically everyone can use, worldwide.

I don’t normally disagree with anything Nathan says, particularly about design but I have to depart from him on why we don’t notice the excellence of Google Maps.

I think we have become accustomed to its excellence and since we don’t look elsewhere (most of us), then we don’t notice that it isn’t commonplace.

In fact for most of us it is a universe with one inhabitant, Google Maps.

That takes a lot of very hard work and skill.

The question is do you have the chops to make your topic map of one or more infoverses the “only” inhabitant, by user choice?

January 8, 2012

Mapping the Iowa caucus results: how it’s done with R

Filed under: Mapping,Maps,R — Patrick Durusau @ 7:22 pm

Mapping the Iowa caucus results: how it’s done with R

David Smith writes:

If you’ve been following the presidential primary process here in the US, you’ve probably seen many maps of the results of the Iowa caucuses by now (such as this infamous one from Fox News). But you might be interested to learn how such maps can be made using the R language.

BTW, David includes pointers to Offensive Politics, which self-describes as:

offensive politics uses technology and math to help progressives develop strategy, raise money and target voters to win elections.

A number of interesting projects and data sets that could be used with topic maps.

Other sources of political data, techniques or software?

January 2, 2012

Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science

Filed under: Citation Indexing,Mapping,Maps,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 6:30 pm

Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science Citation: Bollen J, Van de Sompel H, Hagberg A, Bettencourt L, Chute R, et al. (2009) Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science. PLoS ONE 4(3): e4803. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0004803.

A bit dated but interesting none the less:

Abstract

Background

Intricate maps of science have been created from citation data to visualize the structure of scientific activity. However, most scientific publications are now accessed online. Scholarly web portals record detailed log data at a scale that exceeds the number of all existing citations combined. Such log data is recorded immediately upon publication and keeps track of the sequences of user requests (clickstreams) that are issued by a variety of users across many different domains. Given these advantages of log datasets over citation data, we investigate whether they can produce high-resolution, more current maps of science.

Methodology

Over the course of 2007 and 2008, we collected nearly 1 billion user interactions recorded by the scholarly web portals of some of the most significant publishers, aggregators and institutional consortia. The resulting reference data set covers a significant part of world-wide use of scholarly web portals in 2006, and provides a balanced coverage of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. A journal clickstream model, i.e. a first-order Markov chain, was extracted from the sequences of user interactions in the logs. The clickstream model was validated by comparing it to the Getty Research Institute’s Architecture and Art Thesaurus. The resulting model was visualized as a journal network that outlines the relationships between various scientific domains and clarifies the connection of the social sciences and humanities to the natural sciences.

Conclusions

Maps of science resulting from large-scale clickstream data provide a detailed, contemporary view of scientific activity and correct the underrepresentation of the social sciences and humanities that is commonly found in citation data.

An improvement over traditional citation analysis but it seems to be on the coarse side to me.

That is to say users don’t request nor do authors cite papers as a whole. In other words, there are any number of ideas in a particular paper which may merit citation and a user or author may be interested in only one.

Tracing the lineage of an idea should be getting easier, yet I have the uneasy feeling that it is becoming more difficult.

Yes?

December 27, 2011

Best Maps and Visualizations of 2011

Filed under: Maps,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 7:11 pm

Best Maps and Visualizations of 2011

From Spatialanalysis.co.uk a selection of rather stunning maps and visualizations.

The “naming rivers and places” map illustrates the issue of different identifiers by different communities. This one is based on geographic location. I am not sure how you would handle the topography but similar maps could be constructed of terminology usage by profession/occupation. Or between specialities within profession or occupations.

December 22, 2011

Experimental isarithmic maps visualise electoral data

Filed under: Mapping,Maps,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 7:40 pm

Experimental isarithmic maps visualise electoral data

From the post:

David B. Sparks, a fifth-year PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Duke University, has today published a fascinating set of experiments using ‘Isarithmic’ maps to visualise US party identification. Isarithmic maps are essentially topographic/contour maps and offer an alternative approach to plotting geo-spatial data using choropleth maps. This is a particularly interesting approach for the US with its extreme population patterns.

Very impressive work. Read this post and then David’s original.

FYI:

Choropleth maps use city, county, etc. boundaries, within which colors appear.

Isarithmic maps use color to present the same information but without the legal boundaries that appear in choropleth maps.

December 18, 2011

Subway Map Visualization jQuery Plugin

Filed under: JQuery,Mapping,Maps,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 8:47 pm

Subway Map Visualization jQuery Plugin by Nik Kalyani.

From the post:

I have always been fascinated by the visual clarity of the London Underground map. Given the number of cities that have adopted this mapping approach for their own subway systems, clearly this is a popular opinion. At a conference some years back, I saw a poster for the Yahoo! Developer Services. They had taken the concept of a subway map and applied it to create a YDN Metro Map. Once again, I was in awe of the visual clarity of this map in helping one understand the various Yahoo! services and how they inter-related with each other. I thought it would be awesome if there were a pseudo-programmatic way in which to render such maps to convey real-world ecosystems. A few examples I can think of:

  • University departments, offices, student groups
  • Government
  • Open Source projects
  • Internet startups by category

More examples on this blog: Ten Examples of the Subway Map Metaphor.

Fast-forward to now. Finally, with the advent of HTML5 <canvas> element and jQuery, I felt it was now possible to implement this in a way that with a little bit of effort, anyone who knows HTML can easily create a subway map. I felt a jQuery plugin was the way to go as I had never created one before and also it seemed like the most well-suited for the task.

A complete step-by-step example follows and is the sort of documentation that while difficult to write, saves every user of the software time further down the road.

The plug-in has any number of uses, a traditional public transportation map for your locale or as used by the author, a map that lays out a software project.

If you use this for a software project, you will need to make your own icons for derailment, track hazards and the causes of the same. 😉

December 15, 2011

Google Map Maker Opens Its Editing Tools To Everyone

Filed under: Mapping,Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 7:50 pm

Google Map Maker Opens Its Editing Tools To Everyone By Jon Mitchell.

From the post:

Google announced a major redesign of Google Map Maker today. This is the tool that allows anyone to propose edits to the live Google map, so that locals can offer more detail than Google’s own teams can provide. The new tools offer simple ways to add and edit places, roads and paths, as well as reviewing the edits of others.

That peer review element is key to Google Maps’ new direction. In September, Google rearranged the Map Maker review process, deputizing regional expert reviewers to expand its capacity to handle crowd-sourced edits. Today’s new tools take that a step further, allowing anyone to review proposed edits before they’re incorporated into the live map.

Is there a lesson for crowd-topic map here?

Or do we have to go through the painful cycles of peer review + editors, only to eventually find that the impact on quality is nearly nil? At least for public maps. Speciality maps, where you have to at least know the domain, may, emphasis on may, be a different issue.

If you are a professional in a field, consider how many “peer-reviewed” articles from twenty (20) years ago are still cited today? They were supposed to be the best papers to be read at a conference or published in your flagship journal. Yes?

Some still are cited. Now that’s peer review. But it took twenty years to kick in.

I suspect the real issue for most topic maps is going to be too few contributors and not too many of the unwashed.

Mapping, like vocabularies, is a question of who gets to decide.

November 23, 2011

Crowdsourcing Maps

Filed under: Authoring Topic Maps,Crowd Sourcing,Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 7:35 pm

Crowdsourcing Maps by Mikhil Masli appears in the November 2011 issue of Computer.

Mikhil describes geowikis as having three characteristics that enable crowdsourcing of maps:

  • simple, WYSIWYG editing of geographic features like roads and landmarks
  • versioning that works with a network of tightly coupled objects rather than independent documents, and
  • spatial monitoring tools that make it easier for users to “watch” a geographic area for possibly malicious edits and to interpret map changes visually.

How would those translate into characeristics of topic maps?

  • simple WYSIWYG interface
  • versioning at lowest level
  • subject monitoring tools to enable watching for edits

Oh, I forgot, the topic map originator would have to supply the basic content of the map. Not going to be very interesting to have an empty map for other to fill in.

That is where geographic maps have the advantage is that there is already some framework, into which any user can add their smaller bit of information.

In creating environments where we want users to add to topic maps, we need to populate those “maps” and make it easy for users to contribute.

For example, a library catalog is already populated with information and one possible goal (it may or may not be yours) would be to annotate library holdings with commentary by anonymous or non-anonymous comments/reviews by library patrons. The binding could be based on the library’s internal identifier with other subjects (such as roles) being populated transparently to the user.

Could you do that without a topic map? Possibly, depending on your access to the internals of your library catalog software. But could you then also associate all those reviews with a particular author and not a particular book they had written? 😉 Yes, gets dicey when requirements for information delivery change over time. Topic maps excel at such situations because the subjects you want need only be defined. (Well, there is a bit more to it than that but the margin is too small to write it all down.)

My point here is that topic maps can be authored and vetted by small groups of experts but that they can also, with some planning, be usefully authored by large groups of individuals. That places a greater burden on the implementer of the authoring interface but experience with that sort of thing appears to be growing.

November 6, 2011

piecemeal geodata

Filed under: Geographic Data,Geographic Information Retrieval,Maps,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 5:43 pm

piecemeal geodata

Michal Migurski on the difficulties of using OpenStreetMap data:

Two weeks ago, I attended the 5th annual OpenStreetMap conference in Denver, State of the Map. My second talk was called Piecemeal Geodata, and I hoped to communicate some of the pain (and opportunity) in dealing with OpenStreetMap data as a consumer of the information, downstream from the mappers but hoping to make maps or work with the dataset. Harry Wood took notes that suggested I didn’t entirely miss the mark, but after I was done Tom MacWright congratulated me on my “excellent stealth rage talk”. It wasn’t really supposed to be ragey as such, so here are some of my slides and notes along with some followup to the problems I talked about.

Topic maps are in use in a number of commercial and governmental venues but aren’t the sort of thing you hear about like Twitter or Blackberries (mostly about outages).

Anticipating more civil disturbances over the next several years, do topic maps have something to offer when coupled with a technology like Google Maps or OSM?

It is one thing to indicate your location using an app, but can you report movement of forces in a way that updates the maps of some colleagues? In a secure manner?

What features would a topic map need for such an environment?

high road, for better OSM cartography

Filed under: Geographic Data,Geographic Information Retrieval,Maps,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 5:43 pm

high road, for better OSM cartography

From the post:

High Road is a framework for normalizing the rendering of highways from OSM data, a critical piece of every OSM-based road map we’ve ever designed at Stamen. Deciding exactly which kinds of roads appear at each zoom level can really be done just once, and ideally shouldn’t be part of a lengthy database query in your stylesheet. In Cascadenik and regular Mapnik’s XML-based layer definitions, long queries balloon the size of a style until it’s impossible to scan quickly. In Carto’s JSON-based layer definitions the multiline-formatting of a complex query is completely out of the question. Further, each system has its own preferred way of helping you handle road casings.

Useful rendering of geographic maps (and the data you attach to them) is likely to be useful in a number of topic map contexts.

PS: OSM = OpenStreetMap.

October 28, 2011

Radical Cartography

Filed under: Cartography,Geographic Data,Maps,Visualization — Patrick Durusau @ 3:12 pm

Radical Cartography

You have to choose categories from the left-hand menu to see any content.

A wide variety of content, some of which may be familiar, some of which may not be.

I was particularly amused by the “Center of the World” map. Look for New York and you will find it.

To me it explains why 9/11 retains currency while the poisoning of a large area in Japan with radiation has slipped from view, at least in the United States. (To pick only one event that merits more informed coverage and attention that it has gotten in the United States.)

October 23, 2011

The US ZIPScribble Map

Filed under: Mapping,Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 7:22 pm

The US ZIPScribble Map

From the post:

What would happen if you were to connect all the ZIP codes in the US in ascending order? Is there a system behind the assignment of ZIP codes? Are they organized in a grid? The result is surprising and much more interesting than expected.

The idea for the ZIPScribble came from playing with Ben Fry’s excellent zipdecode. That little applet allows you to explore the ZIP codes interactively, and reveals some very interesting patterns. What it does not give you, however, is an idea of the overall structure of the ZIP space. Jeffrey Heer has reimplemented zipdecode using his prefuse toolkit, and provides a file containing ZIP codes and coordinates. So off I went on a little programming exercise to see what simply connecting the dots would do.

Not recent (2006) but an interesting exercise. Serves as encouragement to map data to see what, if any, interesting patterns result.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress