mapping for a changing california
Welcome to the Kellylab blog! We post fun facts and things that catch our eye. Occasionally I wax lyrically about a topic of interest.
The USGS earthquake site that we all love and was the inspiration for OakMapper has reorganized a bit, and has some nice global quake maps. See that we on the Hayward fault are not alone: USGS Earthquake Hazards Program
.
Y'all might be interested in this. Hell, I might even go. Via the geowanking list,
A quick reminder: WhereCamp is being held June 2-3 at the Yahoo! Sunnyvale campus. There'll be sessions and whatnot. You might also consider it a Geowanking list meet-up of sorts. Description: WhereCamp un-conference. Free. A hugely energetic overlap of diverse interests ranging from newbies, web 2.0 and mobile developers, social place hackers and artists to grad students, geographers, earth scientists and people focused on humanitarian and environmental efforts. Wiki: http://wherecamp.pbwiki.com/WhereCampSF Directions: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/address/ Registered Attendees: http://wherecamp.pbwiki.com/WhereCampSFRegistrants and: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/170065/ See you there! -- Joshua Schachter http://del.icio.us/joshua http://joshua.schachter.org/
After I saw this: I created a specialized, simplified, hacked up version on giif, that is pretty useful. the simplest way to see its use is by going here (ken-ichi, i'm leaving the link text == href intentionally): http://firecenter.berkeley.edu/proxy/geoservice.py/geocode/2134%20Allston%20Way,%20Berkeley,%20CA,%2094704 that is the lat/lon of CanCun Burritos. If you prefer your burritos in UTM, you can request by appending ?epsg=26910 to the end: http://firecenter.berkeley.edu/proxy/geoservice.py/geocode/2134%20Allston%20Way,%20Berkeley,%20CA,%2094704?epsg=26910 or any valid EPSG code that GDAL on giifweb will recognize. (if you dont know what EPSG is, you should consider freeing yourself from your dependency on ESRI products.) likewise, reverse geocoding: http://firecenter.berkeley.edu/proxy/geoservice.py/reverse_geocode/-122.2584/37.8675 and it may return you a list of info. depending on wether geonames.org can reverse_geocode your points. again that assumes lat/lon, you can specify an EPSG code by appening ?epsg=26910 to the end of the query. it's useful to have this built into a webGIS. where,perhaps, the user enters an address and you move the map to that lat/lon. the script will generate an example if you browse to: http://firecenter.berkeley.edu/proxy/geoservice.py/example if you enter an address and an EPSG, it should alert the lat/lon, and then try to reverse_geocode and alert that derived place. if you view the source on that page, you can see how to include the necessary javascript: and if you browse to that url, you'll see the lovely javascript that is generated. Since AJAX is used, you'll either need to download the source to somewhere that has GDAL and web.py installed, or be on giifweb. to use the javascript, you need to attach an event to call the geocode() javascript function:
document.getElementById('button').onclick = function(){
geocode(document.getElementById('address').value, 4326);
};
where geocode() generates a url and makes the AJAX request to server to do the geocoding for you. again, the 4326 is the default, optional EPSG, to use other projections, just put that as the 2nd argument. then, when the result returns from the server, it geocode.callback is called with the resulting JSON: so you can define your own callback like: geocode.callback = function(result){ // do something with the result. document.getElementById('x').value = result.x document.getElementById('y').value = result.y }; where result.x and result.y correspond to the x and y properties here it's simpler than it sounds, best to view and read the source of the example. or better yet, just make the python script print itself. in all places in this post where it says firecenter.berkeley.edu, you can substitute giif.cnr.berkeley.edu or giifweb.cnr.berkeley.edu, and it will work as it should. and you will have to do this if you use the javascript/AJAX because of cross-domain issues. sorry i dont know how to format html properly on this blag.
Google Earth has begun mapping the Darfur crisis.
Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft have all announced that they now support the GeoRSS standard. This standard allows RSS feeds to provide a location that corresponds with the story in the feed.
Check out KQED's beautiful website: QUEST
.
Here are some nice examples of "storymapping" projects given to me by SNAMP collaborators. Check out: Story Mapping Project, Saving the Sierra; and Community Walk.
Over the past few months, I've run into some cool Google Maps mashups. Check and see.
This is on Friday at 3PM down at Y!RB down on University. Here's the Upcoming.org link, and the abstract:
My exploration of spatial and temporal information dissemination started form the observation that a piece of information could have different value at different location and time, and just-in-time information delivery can be essential in achieving information dissemination efficiency. The exploration resulted with a few new information dissemination strategies that gear towards distributed applications that handle location and time sensitive data. A unified theme among the approaches is making space and time the first class citizen in networking and information dissemination. In this talk I will start from discussion of my past work in this direction in mobile and sensor network context, and discuss potential ramifications beyond the networking context (if time permits).
Flash Earth is a really cool in-browser Flash implementation of, well, basically, Google Earth. I am too lazy to post an image right now, but it's very awesome. You can also choose from a list of imagery sources.
Swivel offers free, public and private, data hosting. You can create nice graphs with your data but also search for other people's data. For now this is not entirely geospatial, but when the api is opened up or they update the service, a geospatial component could be added. For now I would seriously question the reliability and accuracy of any data posted there. Below is an example of a graph made with Swivel.
NASA and the European Space Agency each have websites that provide satellite imagery that's only hours old. Called Rapid Response by NASA and Meris Image Rapid Visualization by the ESA, both systems provide near-real time imagery from moderate resolution sensors (MODIS from NASA and Meris from ESA). Data is free to download.
hi, Abe set up a server with Mapserver, and got all the NAIP imagery. We now have a OGC compliant (more or less) WMS server with the 1M data. This can be accessed via Arc plug-in (talk to Abe) and most open source GIS software. I wrote up what I did here:
http://bpederse.googlepages.com/caliwms.
Odor mapping!
Created from reports sent in by Gawker readers, the map displays particular smells -- horrific and sublime -- encountered throughout New York's subway stations. Mouse over any station to see the station name, subway lines, and types of smells to be found there.
Via BoingBoing
I don't know how I missed it but Flickr finally added their own geotagging interface. It's built with Flash and based on Yahoo Maps (naturally), but it works pretty well. If you've already geotagged some of your photos, you can automatically add them to your map. Otherwise, you just drag them on, placing them wherever you took them. I think the coolest part is how it lumps together nearby photos at larger scales into larger and larger icons. Totally sweet. Check out everyone's photos, or, to really blow your mind, read up on some more of the details, including spatial updates to the Flickr API and tools for autogeotagging cell phone pics and automatically associating them with nearby events listed at Upcoming.org. Struggling . . . to comprehend . . . coolness!