Collaborative mapping for disasters

Tuesday July 08th 2008
Filed Under Community Geography, Features 

BusinessWeek takes a very superficial look at the use of community driven mapping efforts during emergencies.  While the article doesn’t go much in depth on the different types of mapping efforts that kick in during emergencies, it does look at two sides of the collaborative mapping issue. Read more

K-12 Education in GIS

Tuesday July 01st 2008
Filed Under Education, K-12, Link Library 

Collection of references and tutorials on how to teach GIS to K-12 level students. Find lesson plans, user groups and more in the category. Read more

GIS for Kids

Sunday June 29th 2008
Filed Under Features, K-12 

Summer’s here! School will be out and the time abounds when many kids take on new learning experiences. Have you ever wanted your child to understand what it is you do all day long? It’s difficult enough to elucidate to an adult layperson what Geographic Information Systems are; knowing where to start explaining GIS to kids is even harder. Listed here are a few resources both online and on the ground to point you in the right direction to teaching your kids about GIS and mapping. Read more

Making Sense

Sunday June 22nd 2008
Filed Under Features, Location Based Services 

The NY Times (registration required) has a profile on Sense Networks, a company that mines millions of location data points using a tool called Macrosense.  This tool mines data using complex statistical algorithms in order to predict human movement.  The article quotes Tony Jebara, one of the co-founds of Sense who says:  “We can predict tourism, we can tell you how confident consumers are, we can tell retailers about, say, their competitors, who’s coming in from particular neighborhoods.”   The company uses data from a range of sources including data culled from taxi companies and weather data but it also uses data that it won’t disclose.  The company also gathers data by offering parallel services.  The company launched Citysense, a service offered to users of Blackberries and iPhones that learns their movements in order to recommend new places to go based on where other people with similar patterns frequent. 

The Re-birth of Pen and Paper in Mobile GIS

Monday June 16th 2008
Filed Under Features, Mobile GIS 

By Ken Schneider, CEO and President of Adapx

Field data collection is vital to the work of many enterprises and government agencies driving important decisions that ultimately affect the bottom line. Many of the current methods and technologies are inconvenient, error-prone, and time-consuming. Whether in engineering, construction, utilities, military, security, law enforcement, or in any industry with a substantial, mobile field force, there is a great demand for reliable systems that quickly bridge the realities of the field to the desks of decision-makers. 

That said, how do field employees gather essential data across a vast array of extreme environments and emergency situations ranging from construction sites to underground tunnels, in suspended harnesses, on battlefields, and beyond? Read more

Geostatistics

Sunday June 15th 2008
Filed Under GIS Techniques, Link Library, Spatial Analysis 

Geostatistics is a brand of statistics that deals specifically with spatial relationships. Find information about this branch of mathematics, software and tie-ins to GIS. Read more

Kvisu - searching with cartographic results

Thursday June 12th 2008
Filed Under Features 

Kvisu.com is an interesting search engine that places a surface map of the results alongside the traditional text based results set.  Available in both English and French, KartOOvisu creates a visualization of the key words surrounding the search term entered.  Instead of having to research the results by adding keywords, the user can navigate through the visualized key words on the map to access more refined search results.

From the developers:

To move around a city, it is best to have a map with the street index! So why not also use our sense of direction when we search a database or in a search engine results? Since time began, man uses the right side of his brain and more precisely his sense of direction when moving from one location to another. It is this capacity to understand a map naturally that KartOO uses in its cartographic interfaces. The interactive data maps are similar to a road-map:
- The cities are replaced by pages or database results
- The mountains, the roads and the rivers are here thematics, which connect the pages
- The user naturally directs his glance along a thematic to find results, exactly as if it went up a river to find a city.
Quickly analyze large volumes of information

Visit: KartOOvisu

Five Steps to More “Interoperable” CADD Data

Tuesday June 03rd 2008
Filed Under Data, Features 

Paul Bartsch of the Spatial Tips site shares some tips on working with CADD data to make it more “GIS friendly”.

The transition between CADD and GIS can be difficult but if you follow these five simple steps, it shouldn’t be very painful. Read more

Making Navteq Maps

Tuesday June 03rd 2008
Filed Under Data Collection, Features, GPS 

PocketGPSWorld has an inside look at how Navteq’s survey teams update their street maps.  The article looks at how their cars are outfitted with GPS and camera equipment as they travel around the UK updating their geographic data.  Included is a video of the process.

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