geomantic

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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