geomantic

Perspectives on place, space, and location

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Entries Tagged as 'Geographic'

Data Quality & Open Street Map

July 15th, 2009 · No Comments · FOSS4G, Geographic, OpenSource

Last week, I blogged about Open Street Map over on my company’s blog, The Viewshed about Open Street Map and touched briefly on the subject of data quality. I cited the study by Muki Haklay that compares (favorably) the quality of data found in OSM with Ordnance Survey data. More on the subject of OSM [...]

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Map rendering using stylesheets: Cartagen

July 13th, 2009 · No Comments · Geographic

Recently released by members of the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, MA comes this code that uses Geographic Style Sheets (GSS) to drive the map rendering process for web maps in native HTML 5. What this means, according to the developers, is that individuals can style their own maps enabling them to create and communicate [...]

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The Vanishing Flora of Washington and Vicinity

July 7th, 2009 · No Comments · Geographic, Washington, geology, horticulture, mapping

Just released by the City of Alexandria (VA) Department of Recreation, Parks and Cultural Activities’ Horticulture and Natural Resources Section is this survey (.pdf) of the native plants of Alexandria. The survey was conducted from 2002 to 2007 and yielded a total of 810 native species (including infra-specific taxa and hybrids) representing 374 genera and [...]

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Four Short Links

July 6th, 2009 · No Comments · Geographic, Home, OpenSource, mapping

1. Ostensibly devoted to Flash Flex and other Rich Internet Applications (RIA) is the Flexmappers blog.
2. The Transport Politic focused on rail transport and other alternatives to automotive transport.
3. Related to Transport Politic is Streetsblog.net which aggregates some of the nation’s best bloggers on sustainable transport to carry out a discussion place and learning center.
4. [...]

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OGC and OSGeo Sign Memorandum of Understanding | OGC®

January 10th, 2009 · No Comments · FOSS4G, Geographic, OpenSource, standards

This is a good thing for both the standards setting community and the open source community:
OGC and OSGeo Sign Memorandum of Understanding | OGC®
With respect to goals and objectives, both communities have an obvious  natural affinity. I’m encouraged to see this finally happened.

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2008 – The Year of Maps

January 10th, 2009 · No Comments · Geographic

From Boston.com, an interesting piece of journalism about the growing ubiquity of maps. The article cites several examples of  the effect of this ubiquity, which can be applied for good (monitoring global climate change) or bad (Mumbai siege).
Incidentally, I posted a while back about the cartograms from Mark Newman. Newman quite accurately sums up the [...]

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Animation of Wal-Mart’s conquest of America’s retail space

January 7th, 2009 · No Comments · Geographic

Happy New Year, everyone!
Very interesting animation of the growth of Wal-Mart’s store locations. It would be interesting to see an accompanying real-time graph with some statistical interpretation, such as rate of growth, sales volume, revenue, etc.
Watching the Growth of Walmart Across America

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Links for 26 November

November 26th, 2008 · No Comments · Geographic, OpenSource

On the eve of Thanksgiving, the folks at FortiusOne speculate whether Americans will be driving fewer miles on this most heavily traveled of holidays.
Fuzzy Tolerance released Geospatial Portal v2.0, with RESTful services for query and spatial analysis. It’s a good example of (local) government use of open source geospatial software. It’s released under the GNU [...]

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Miscellaneous Links – 15 November

November 15th, 2008 · 2 Comments · FOSS4G, Geographic

With the frenzy of the elections past, I’m gradually returning to normal life. Here are some things that have recently caught my attention.
Fuzzy Tolerance calls attention to a slew of recent open source software releases. Shiny new toys!
From the Google Geo Developers Blog comes word of a snazzy new KML Manual. (Must add this to [...]

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Mapping Election Results

November 5th, 2008 · 1 Comment · Geographic, politics

To put the magnitude of Obama’s victory in perspective, here are links to two interesting maps of election results. Both of these resources provide a much better explanation of the outcome than do the state-level maps, which look pretty evenly divided. The county-level maps are overwhelmingly red, but when adjusted for population the margin of [...]

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