Tag: gis

Google Earth Ate Our Town

The city’s planning department has, over the past 5 years, steadily fed Google a wealth of information about its buildings, property lines, utilities and streets. The result is earth.nanaimo.ca, a clearinghouse of city data viewed through the robust and freely available Google Earth 3D mapping program. The site sorts and maps every business, from restaurants to car dealers, while a click of the mouse brings up the lot size for every property in the city, including the building permit number and zoning history. Homeowners can use the facility to find out specific information about their garbage collection schedule, while the city’s 150-year-old downtown core is rendered in 3D and dotted with 360-degree panoramas.

how to wire up a whole town with geodata

Neighborhood Boundaries

The Zillow data team has created a database of 7000 neighborhood boundaries in the largest cities in the US And we’d like to share them with you! We’re sharing these neighborhoods under a Creative Commons license to allow people to use and contribute to our growing database.

nice. i wonder how accurate?

Better GIS

SDI’s take years, if not decades, before they are ‘fully operational’. In less than 2 and half years Google has built a better ‘SDI’ than anyone else in the world.

i love disrupting industries asleep at the wheel.

ObsKMLGenerate

Consider the below simplest example ObsKML document which represents an air temperature and wind speed at a given platform location and time.

sensorweb here we come?

Backcountry Maps

pretty nice mashup of topo and other maps

Topoware

Topoware is a tableware collection that questions the landscape of dining.

GIS Security Theater

Santa Clara County has stopped selling GIS data, citing concerns the information could end up in the hands of terrorists. But the plaintiffs in a lawsuit over the high costs of that data claim the security concerns are nothing more than a convenient cover.

isn’t that safety fetish useful to hide some government pork behind?

Free online GIS

gCensus nicely builds on GE to add more traditional GIS analysis for the masses

GIS CSE

A highly specialized Custom Search Engine reflecting knowledge and interests in PGIS/PPGIS practice and science.

Google Maps Heatmaps

We wanted a fun data set to play around with and thought traffic congestion/delay would be interesting. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) has a cool data set with average traffic delay for all the US highways available, so we threw that in. One of the problems with pushpins or polylines in Google Maps (and others) is there is no way to visualize what are the high value or low value pushpins. In this case, which road has high traffic delay and which roads have low traffic delay. We do this with a heat map (similar to Zillow, Google Adsense, etc.) that can be dynamically refactored as you zoom in/out (see previous post). We added to this heat map tool a concentration index – which gives you a score of the value (weight) of your pushpins and how closely they are located together. Once you have the score you can see if location “A” is better than location “B”. In this case is traffic delay more concentrated in location “A” or location “B”