During our trip to China in December Corrie and I definitely felt the effects of the poor air quality. This has also been the discussion for over a year leading up to the Beijing Olympics that start tomorrow. China has been trying a variety of mechanisms to cut down on pollution including removing all cars from the roads for 2 weeks and seeding rain clouds to pull the particulates out of the air.

The Olympics are finally here and the question still remains about the air quality and it’s effect on the athletes. One even wonders what the availability of this data is on the ground there. So to help out, I built a Mapufacture map that pulls the daily data reports from the Beijing Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau. You can also get the GeoRSS and KML.

As part of the new partnership we’re looking at the combination of geospatial data with dynamic information and brought in the Olympic venues as additional map layer.

Thanks to Corrie for the environmental analysis.

View the Beijing Air Quality during the Olympics map.

I’m incredibly thrilled to share the news that Mapufacture, my company co-founded with Mikel, will be joining FortiusOne. Mikel, and Seanshare their thoughts on BrainOff and the GeoCommons blog and here is the official press release.

Building Mapufacture has been an incredible experience. What started out as a project to demonstrate an index of a new format called GeoRSS grew into a company that effectively demonstrated geospatial aggregation and provided free mapping tools to organizations and individuals around the world.

Being an entrepreneur means there is no definition of evenings, weekends or holidays. As a small company, everyone is responsible for development, management, accounting, business, public relations, server maintenance and more. It’s exhilarating and exhausting. Over the past several years, Mikel and I have been proponents of open data and services, and saw the GeoWeb become a complex, and fast-paced domain.

The evolution of Mapufacture

Joining FortiusOne means we now have the support of a larger company and infrastructure to better support and build these ideas. The GeoCommons team is stellar - we have been working closely with them this year on a variety of projects such as interoperability testbeds, geodata federation, lightweight metadata standards, and KML standardization.

Mapufacture + FortiusOne

As Sean talked about in his post, GeoCommons has been approaching a different aspect of the GeoWeb. GeoCommons Finder! is a powerful infrastructure for hosting and utilizing large, complex geodata sets. By contrast, Mapufacture is focused on tying into the dynamic geoweb of syndicated data and web services. We’ve built adapters to many social and map making sites, as well as generally gathering up the available GeoRSS and KML that has been emerging and providing interfaces to find, visualize, and access these in a variety of formats. The goal is to allow utilization of personalized data sets produced by any other toolset.

Together the complex, but widely used large data sets, combined with the varied and dynamic feeds provides users with complete flexibility in using geospatial visualization and analysis to address whatever situation is important to them. The data continues to be free, so users are able to find, combine, and save this data for use in other appropriate applications. Joining together Mapufacture and FortiusOne will incredibly accelerate the realization of this concept.

We fully appreciate all the help our supporters have provided over the years - and believe that now is an incredibly exciting time for Where2.0.

“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.”
- Benjamin Franklin

I met Jim Stogdill at FooCamp and we had quite a few discussions about the use of new and web technologies in the government, military and other large organizations. He was also carrying a really great Crown Graphic, bellows camera that captured authentic looking aged photographs, albeit on discontinued and hard to find Polaroid film

He’s putting together BarCampMil, a barcamp for the Defense, IC, Government, and Humanitarian communities. It is on August 8th, from 8AM until 5PM or later at Mercury Federal Systems offices in Crystal City, VA next to the Metro. (via Limn This). So if you can be in the DC area next Friday, you should definitely come by.

And really, where’s the logo Jim?

As a member of NACIS, North American Cartographic Information Society, I get issues of the quarterly magazine Cartographic Perspectives. Typically it is filled with articles on how to make pirate maps with ArcMap, the history of projections, or other subjects interesting to cartographers.

I was much amused to see that the Winter 2008 issue carried an opinion piece by Michael Peterson titled “Maps and the Internet: What a Mess It Is and How to Fix It”. It apparently is a response to a keynote given at the International Cartography Conference that discussed the disparity between map-making tools and the lack of knowledge required to use these tools.

Personally, I found the opinion in Cartographic Perspectives to be short-sighted and lacked understanding of the trends occurring in digital web-mapping. Generally the article is a doomsday scenario about how the lack of net neutrality, internet addiction, government restrictions on access, Google Map, system administration and open-source software is harming mapping and cartography.

The last point is perhaps the most humorous, where Peterson complains that open-source software is difficult to maintain and has less than appealing interfaces. What he fails to mention is how powerful and compelling these tools are now when used appropriately, particularly OpenLayers - which is essentially a drop-in replacement for other mapping libraries. Map servers are getting easier to setup and maintain, geo-hosting sites are showing up, and user-interfaces are getting better.

In fact, he runs the gamut of naysaying the current mapping solutions on the web without actually providing any suggestions or solutions. His only real suggestion on “How to Fix It” is to say:

“…organizations like NACIS and the International Cartographic Association (ICA) have a major role to play in defining the function and form of Internet Maps.”

I do agree with some of his overall sentiments. Modern mapping as it is largely represented at this moment has achieved putting maps online and digitized. It has not, however, truly pushed into becoming a new type of medium and utilizing the capabilities of dynamic data and queryable, modifiable interfaces. You can begin to see the emergence of these now, and I believe that the next 6 months will see a whole new round of mapping paradigms. I also think that cartographers and geographers have a wealth of experience and knowledge to share and help guide this {re,e}olution, but that it also won’t be entirely in their control.

A couple of weeks ago, Bjørn Sandvik pushed out his thematic mapping engine: http://thematicmapping.org/engine/. It’s a nice and simple tool for classifying and visualizing the freely available United Nations OneStop Data.

Unlike most other theming engines, it also handles time very well. I generated a time-history thematic map of internet users around the world and temporally visualized in GoogleEarth:

Internet users per 100 Population - Temporal Earth from mapufacture on Vimeo.

Check out his other tutorials and information in the blog about using GeoJSON, KML, databases, proportional symbols and more.

Bjørn is continuing to tweak the engine and is in discussions on the OSGeo mailing lists about the appropriate open-source license under which to release the engine.

It’s great to see some really compelling next-generation web-based and usable geospatial tools emerging.