Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
Water moves in predictable ways across undulating landscapes, but it can be hard to appreciate from a human perspective on the ground. It’s much easier to understand when you’re essentially a giant hovering over the land with the ability to move mountains and make rain.
Found at https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/make-topographical-maps-in-a-sandbox
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
Before there were the continents, there was Pangea. Two hundred million years ago, the enormous land mass began to break apart and we’ve been separated ever since — but a map tool can help you find where a given town would have been on the supercontinent.
Found at https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/17/17467686/map-pangea-earth-antipodes-science-history-tools
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
The first modern atlas was created in the late 16th century, and was called Theater of the World. It included more than 50 pages of maps of places around the world, which Dutch cartographer Abraham Ortelius likened to a stage where human life played out
Found at https://www.citylab.com/design/2016/09/mapping-how-shakespeare-saw-the-world/500786/
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
The first “schoolgirl map” that caught historian Susan Schulten’s attention was made in 1823 by Frances Henshaw, a student at one of the best schools for girls in the young United States.
Found at https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/early-american-schoolgirl-maps
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
How the U.S. Maps the World’s Most Disputed Territories When the United States decides to recognize a new government, or an existing country changes its name, Leo Dillon and his team at the State Department spring into action.
Found at https://www.wired.com/2014/01/state-department-maps/?cid=co17535794
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
This is a map of the online world. Each country is resized for the popularity of its domain name. Lots of weird stuff going on, but the eye is immediately drawn to the map's greatest anomaly: Tokelau. That Pacific island nation is the online world's only true superpower.
Found at https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/tokelau-the-worlds-online-superpower
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
This vintage-style map of the USA puts the titles of songs that mention place names onto their corresponding geographical spot. So, for example, the Beasties Boys' "No Sleep Till Brooklyn" is placed right on top of Brooklyn.
Found at https://boingboing.net/2018/11/10/a-cool-retro-map-of-usa-song-t.html
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
Wow, almost four years later and this thing just exploded. ... To anyone asking for permission to use this for their own campaigns...
Found at https://boingboing.net/2018/10/17/every-fantasy-map.html
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
Most of the time, The New York Times asks you to read something. Today we are inviting you, simply, to look. On this page you will find maps showing almost every building in the United States.
Found at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/12/us/map-of-every-building-in-the-united-states.html
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
The Medieval Fantasy City Generator; fill in a few options and press go, and voila! I have no idea how plausible these are, but they're MUCH better than anything I ever came up with as a Dungeon Master.
Found at https://boingboing.net/2018/09/10/heroic-cartography.html
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Orange Peel Map of Japan #map #maps
Found at https://twitter.com/onlmaps/status/1030814088564068352
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
The Ancient Earth Globe is an interactive 3D globe that depics the Earth at various points in geological history from 750m years ago until now. Here it is 300m years ago. Late Carboniferous. Plants developed root systems that allowed them to grow larger and move inland.
Found at https://boingboing.net/2018/08/06/ancient-earth-globe-see-what.html
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
Antipodr is a nifty little site that lets visitors learn what's on the opposite side of the globe from any coordinate. For instance, Auckland, New Zealand is directly opposite Venta de Leche in southern Spain. Honolulu, Hawai'i is directly opposite Dekar in Botswana.
Found at https://boingboing.net/2018/08/06/find-the-other-side-of-the-wor.html
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
The East Cut is a neighborhood in San Francisco invented by a branding agency. Such things usually wither on the local-business bullshit vine, but thanks to Google Maps, it's now the plain reality of that part of town.
Found at https://boingboing.net/2018/08/02/if-google-maps-says-a-place-ha.html
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
In southern Wales’ Vale of Glamorgan, archaeologists flying over a prehistoric settlement they had previously studied got a surprise: the ghostly outline of a Roman villa on the ground inside the older settlement’s boundaries.
Found at https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/08/climate-change-brings-the-uks-hidden-past-to-the-surface/
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Bloomberg has an interactive report that shows how America uses its land for different purposes. I was surprised by how much land is dedicated to livestock pasture: 41%. Also the 100 largest landowning families own land equal to the size of Florida.
Found at https://boingboing.net/2018/08/01/fascinating-look-at-how-americ.html
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Composed from 13 years of Cassini probe mission data, NASA's infrared-based map of Titan shows off one of the solar system's most promising worlds.
Found at https://boingboing.net/2018/07/19/nasas-infrared-map-of-titan.html
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
When does drawing a digital line on a satellite map cross an ethereal threshold into the centuries-old practice of licensed land surveying? This is the existential question now before a Mississippi state court.
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
Dutch pastry/dessert chef Daniel Jongsma created this beautiful confection that looks like earth, replete with continents and clouds. Day 5 of the #7dayschallenge where i was invited by @robin_hoedjes here's to share my showpiece during the dutch chocolate masters in 2010.
Found at https://boingboing.net/2018/07/02/check-out-these-gorgeous-edibl.html
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
When a river changes course on its flood plain, it can leave an entire bend of the river cut off from the new flow, forming an oxbow lake. Seen in bright blue in this shot of the Songhua River in northeast China, they are usually narrow crescents.
Found at https://boingboing.net/2018/06/26/cool-satellite-view-of-dozens.html
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
When you take a photo from an airplane, the last thing you'd expect is for a complete and utter stranger to draw a load of squiggly lines over it. But, then again, the internet never fails to defy our expectations.
Found at https://mashable.com/2018/06/26/aerial-photo-london-tube/
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
You've likely seen maps of the earth with land and sea inverted, where Asia becomes the world's greatest ocean and the Pacific a vast, sprawling continent. But high school geography teacher John M Adams took it a step further and explained what it would be like to live in this parallel world.
Found at https://boingboing.net/2018/06/11/what-the-world-would-be-like-i.html
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
The small but bright fissure at the left edge of Kilauea's lava field can already be seen from space via infrared imaging, but it's dwarfed by the magnitude of previously existing flows.
Found at https://boingboing.net/2018/06/04/kilaueas-new-lava-flow-can-b.html
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
jamaps created a map that shows all the main roads in Britain and nothing else, giving the vague impression of something weirdly biological.
Found at https://boingboing.net/2018/05/30/map-of-britains-roads-and.html
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
New Zealand is continually omitted from maps of the world. Seriously, there's an entire Reddit thread highlighting examples of the country being completely wiped from global existence.
Found at https://mashable.com/2018/05/01/get-new-zealand-on-the-map/
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, The New York Public Library. "A new map of Great Britain." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1736. https://ift.tt/2HTr3Yo
Found at https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e4-5230-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
Nowadays most of us resort to our smartphones and Google Maps to help navigate us around unfamiliar places. But things were a little different for some of the world’s first explorers who used printed maps and atlases to guide them.
Found at https://www.housebeautiful.com/uk/lifestyle/a20115850/sothebys-auction-ancient-maps/
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Title A geographically correct map of the state of Texas Additional title: Texas, the empire state of the great southwest Names Texas & Pacific Railway (Publisher) Collection Dates / Origin Date Issued: 1876 (Inferred) Place: Marshall, TX Publisher: Texas and Pacific Railway Company Library loc
Found at https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/7c49dc40-d2fe-0135-b8cb-45b777ad6911
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
There's 142 Switzerlands there, since no one put the number in the comments. And, since Switzerland's area is 41,285 km 2 and Brazil's 8,515,767 km2, it's actually a little over 206 times larger.
Found at https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/8ee90c/how_many_switzerlands_fits_in_brazil_1100x1100/
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Late last year, Maarten Inghels of Antwerp, Belgium, was reading the paper when a news story caught his attention. Yet another camera system was about to be installed in the city, he read. Not only that, this particular system was smart, an active rather than passive watcher.
Found at https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/antwerp-invisible-route-map-surveillance-cameras
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
Outside the big cities, England and Wales is aging. From Plumplot: In 2002, 40% of the population was over 44 years old. Fourteen years later it was 43.5%. The share almost equaled to the population below 35, which was 43.7%. Life expectancy also increased.
Found at https://boingboing.net/2018/04/16/map-of-how-england-and-wales-i.html
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
With five cities in the top 20 of the Economist Intelligence Unit’s annual global liveability survey, Australia boasts some of the most attractive urban environments in the world.
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
As you know, Eastern Finland has a lot of forests.
Found at https://worstofosm.tumblr.com/?og=1
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Fictional worlds such as Narnia, Gotham City and Neverland have mysteriously appeared on road signs in Oxfordshire. The roundabout signs in Didcot - described as England's most normal town - also direct drivers to Middle Earth and Emerald City.
Found at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-43459598
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
A couple of days ago, one of my favorite cartographers, Esri’s John Nelson declared his love for dot density maps. I like dot density maps too, but never really thought through why.
Found at https://www.maartenlambrechts.com/2018/02/13/one-person-one-dot-maps-and-how-to-make-them.html
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
A recent aerial survey revealed thousands of ancient Maya structures previously hidden beneath the dense Guatemalan jungle, including houses, irrigation canals, fortifications, and even a pyramid.
Found at https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/02/lasers-shed-some-light-on-the-maya-snake-kingdom/
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are iconic fantasy adventures, and readers return to them time and again because of the rich detail that defines the world.
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
It shows the sheer scale of the infrastructure which keeps the internet running. It's built up over decades, mainly as a result of private enterprise rather than coordinated state infrastructure projects, like road or water networks.
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
Save this picture! Stanford University experts digitally assembled what is considered the largest world map produced in the 16th-century.
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
How do you map the hunt for a fictional creature in a nonsensical poem? If you’re Lewis Carroll, author of The Hunting of the Snark and, of course, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, you create a map devoid of meaning: just white space, a few notations, and the points of the compass.
Found at https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/mapping-literary-worlds
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
Cottereau: This video shows the borders and populations of each country in Europe, for every year since 400 BC. Vassal states and colonies are not included in the count of a country's population." What a mess! One thing I learned is how sparsely-populated Britain was in the Roman age.
Found at https://boingboing.net/2018/01/30/european-history-and-populatio.html
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled Monday that the state’s US House maps were based on a Republican partisan gerrymander that violated the state’s constitution — and struck them down.
Found at https://www.vox.com/2018/1/22/16920636/pennsylvania-gerrymander-ruling-house
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
One of my favorite illustrators is eBoy (a collective of people from Germany and LA). They designed our Jackhammer Jill logo and did a cool Boing Boing shirt many years ago (I don't think it's available any longer).
Found at https://ift.tt/2AwWMOV
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Starting with London’s Tube, a new series aims to capture the art and history of rapid transit systems around the world. Blue Crow Media, an independent map publisher, recently released their first in a series of public transit maps: a double-sided, cartographic guide of the London Tube.
Found at https://ift.tt/2zBDYu8
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
In 1663, Europeans called Australia ‘New Holland’, New Zealand was considered one land mass and Tasmania had only been sighted by Abel Tasman – it would be another hundred years before Europeans would set foot there.
Found at https://ift.tt/2lUUD9s
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
As most New Yorkers know, the five boroughs are filled with impressive architecture, but few have paid particular attention to the material used to create it.
Found at https://ift.tt/2j7OD9F
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Not a day goes by that I don’t use Google Maps for something or other, whether it’s basic navigation, researching an address, or finding a dry cleaner. Though some of us might resent the dominance such mapping technology has over our daily interactions, there’s no denying its endless utility.
Found at https://ift.tt/2je0DFQ
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
The EarthWindMap not only animates our homeworld's air currents, but you can drag, zoom and warp the view to create unique projections of its surface.
Found at https://ift.tt/2hxRJ9o
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
New Zealanders fed up with their country being left off of world maps set up a Reddit group to share their exasperation. The 27,000 subscribers of "Maps Without NZ" post pictures of the world with the island nation left off.
Found at https://ift.tt/2zyto9W
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Although it resembles nothing like the clear outline of a modern map of the region, the Peutinger Table is a snapshot of how Romans viewed their world, one in which they were at the center.
Found at https://ift.tt/2xjdf6Y
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
A few years ago, the climate adaptation researcher Ben Smith—then a Ph.D. student at Kings College London—was working on his dissertation, about the effectiveness of water restoration projects in the United Kingdom.
Found at https://ift.tt/2zKMTtQ
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Forty airports including San Francisco and San Jose are included on the map of delays updated by the Federal Aviation Administration’s Air Traffic Control System Command Center. The status indicates general airport conditions, usually as affected by weather, rather than individual flights.
Found at https://ift.tt/2zX8VZy
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
A lot of people have problems with the Mercator map of the world. Fortunately, The True Size is set up to help cartography fans see how much it distorts land mass by allowing users to move outlines of nations across the 2-D images. It is oddly addictive.
Found at https://ift.tt/2xOhrJw
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
According to medieval mapmakers, the world was made up of three continents ringed by narrow bodies of water. When the voyages of Christopher Columbus, Amerigo Vespucci, and Ferdinand Magellan uncovered continents previously unknown to Europeans, this posed a major problem for those cartographers.
Found at https://ift.tt/2zktnax
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
In 1976, Saul Steinberg drew View of the World from 9th Avenue, an illustration that became perhaps the most famous magazine cover in the history of The New Yorker.
Found at https://ift.tt/2h3wgom
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
A great old map of transit from Salt Lake City, showing bus lines (in green), trolleybus lines (in red, and curiously referred to as “electric coaches”, a designation that only seems to have been used here), and the one last remaining streetcar line (in blue).
Found at https://ift.tt/2zWMSmy
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Last week, scientists released a monumental interactive catalog that tracks 94 ancient tectonic plates lurking deep within Earth’s mantle, a resource they’re calling an “Atlas of the Underworld.
Found at https://ift.tt/2zy4fdh
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Hundreds of mysterious structures have been discovered on ancient lava domes in Saudi Arabia by an archaeologist using Google Earth. But the structures found by Mr Kennedy are unlike any before them.
Found at https://ift.tt/2yspsrp
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Found at https://ift.tt/2xOHYpg
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
They’re fantastical, fierce and sometimes even frightening, and talking about them will capture the attention of just about any crowd. So says Chet Van Duzer of something that used to regularly adorn maps during the Middle Ages and Renaissance: sea monsters.
Found at https://ift.tt/2xRp1aq
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
America votes Democrat but elects Republicans, and it's all thanks to how the country is divided up. Even if gerrymandering dies in court, Americans must still live with the the plain fact that every state gets the same number of senators. But what if things were different?
Found at https://ift.tt/2zvLo2z
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
After the Soviet Union crumbled in the early 1990s, something altogether eerie was discovered. Hundreds and thousand of maps of countries and cities throughout the world had been drawn up by Soviet cartographers, and annotated — often in exacting detail — using Cyrillic script.
Found at https://ift.tt/2zuiBv0
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Maps convey simple historical narratives very clearly–but how useful are simple stories about the past? Many history textbooks and studies of the Reformation include some sort of map that claims to depict Europe’s religious divisions in the sixteenth century.
Found at https://ift.tt/2hKxuVD
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
The layout of London can only be fully understood if we examine it in three dimensions. Tim Dunn takes a look at some of the capital's greatest cutaway diagrams. Our city is a fascinating, infuriating, terrifying, beautiful place.
Found at https://ift.tt/2gjSf72
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
"What about an Independent Northern Ireland" - since it was a higher figure, I used support for a United Ireland. But otherwise if anyone is curious support for an independent Northern Ireland is around 5-7%.
Found at https://ift.tt/2yg6LGd
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Amidst the abundant data collected during the years, researchers around the world came across to specific revelations. Some of these revelations are at variance with the beliefs set by prevailing intellectuals about the human race.
Found at https://ift.tt/2yq2cq8
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
What's different about the Time Map system is that it worries about time first, and specific directions second. (Photo: MapBox) Let's say you're visiting an unfamiliar city for the first time, just dropped off your stuff at the hotel, and are eager to grab something to eat before meeting a friend.
Found at https://ift.tt/2yJDySq
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
When Edward Snowden blew the lid off of the NSA’s mass surveillance program, he also revealed the extent of the government’s smartphone location tracking records.
Found at https://ift.tt/2fnyZ7V
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Almost a hundred years before satellite-based mapping made information available to people at their fingertips, a municipal survey done in Kolkata by British surveyors documented not only streets, houses, landmarks and water bodies but also trees, telegraph and telephone posts, urinals
Found at https://ift.tt/2yjtp1L
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Maps on the Web Powered by Tumblr RSS
Found at https://ift.tt/2fCZlTe
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Location platform Here Technologies calculated how far one hour of driving can take drivers out of major American cities starting on Friday at 4, 7, and 10 pm. The worst of the worst is Boston. Via WaPo:
Found at https://ift.tt/2vL7Ovd
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Found at https://ift.tt/2uU3yIy
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
There has been a resurgence of interest in data visualizations inspired by Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album cover. These so-called “Joy Plots” are easier to create thanks to the development of the “ggjoy” R package and also some nice code posted using D3.
Found at https://spatial.ly/2017/07/joy-division-population-surfaces-and-pioneering-electronic-cartography/
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Population of USA fitted in EU. Ever get into a heated debate about the border that separates Echo Park and Silver Lake? Well that's old hat, and nothing compared to what Eric …
Found at https://ift.tt/2uEXxSa
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
This animated map created from the NOAA, NWS, and PTWC shows every recorded earthquake in chronological order from January 1, 2001 to December 31, 2015. The size of the circle shows the magnitude of the earthquakes in relation to each other. The color represents the earthquake depth.
Found at https://ift.tt/2tZDz0N
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
There’s something exciting about being at a special geographic spot, like the exact center of a continent or a point along an imaginary line like the equator. Throughout the globe, monuments and signs are installed to define these geographically significant locations.
Found at https://ift.tt/2uUSQVc
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
There’s something exciting about being at a special geographic spot, like the exact center of a continent or a point along an imaginary line like the equator. Throughout the globe, monuments and signs are installed to define these geographically significant locations.
Found at https://ift.tt/2uUSQVc
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
We have noticed that you are using an ad blocker. Free access to Standard.co.uk’s comprehensive package of news, sport and entertainment relies on advertising revenue. This allows us to invest in the best writers, pictures and videos.
Found at https://ift.tt/2h8HM1k
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
The official London Underground map is an essential part of living in the capital, but several alternatives have been released in a bid to make commuters' lives easier. Published by Transport for London over the years, they are aimed at the entire cross-section of people who use the Tube.
Found at https://ift.tt/2tXz7RX
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Few people in the world know their way around a map like John Hessler does. The Library of Congress’s “Specialist in Modern Cartography and Geographic Information Science” can look at a Renaissance, bit matrix, or Minecraft map and explain what each signifies and how they all relate.
Found at https://ift.tt/1Fdv8E4
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Few people in the world know their way around a map like John Hessler does. The Library of Congress’s “Specialist in Modern Cartography and Geographic Information Science” can look at a Renaissance, bit matrix, or Minecraft map and explain what each signifies and how they all relate.
Found at https://ift.tt/1Fdv8E4
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
On Sunday, NASA's Earth-monitoring Terra satellite captured this image of a smoke plume from the brutal Alamo Fire blazing in the County of Santa Barbara, California.
Found at https://ift.tt/2ta573p
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
If you get anxiety or claustrophobia, there’s a new Tube map to make it easier for you to get around London. TfL just released a new map which shows which lines go into tunnels, when, and for how long, in a bid to make it easier for people to travel.
Found at https://ift.tt/2tfYhfM
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
I was playing around with map projections one day and became a tad smitten with Buckminster Fuller’s “Dymaxion” Projection. It’s able to unwrap a spherical map of the Earth onto a flat plane with surprisingly little distortion.
Found at https://ift.tt/2tLNJ90
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
Justin O'Beirne of San Francisco, California. Essays, projects, and contact information. Coincidence or not, it was interesting. And it made me wonder what else would change, if we kept watching. Would Google keep adding detail? And would Apple, like Google, also start making changes?
Found at https://ift.tt/2qt735p
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
This novel mapping technique developed by Yasamin Mostofi allows two drones to map the interior of an unknown building by using wifi signals and some impressive number-crunching. More details about how it works here.
Found at https://ift.tt/2rBYo2d
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Found at https://ift.tt/2ss7x07
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
If you think this would make a cool poster, follow this link to send me a few bucks. I’ll email you a crisp PDF for printing! It’s finally done. A subway-style diagram of the major Roman roads, based on the Empire of ca. 125 AD.
Found at https://ift.tt/2ssn0vd
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Here are the "some sheep", and here are the "no sheep" — but where is the green sheep? The national library's Trove digital service has been highlighting quirky old maps of the continent, starting with a 1920s graphic dividing the country up into the sheep haves and have-nots.
Found at https://ift.tt/2mugnao
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Designing a public transit map can be a complicated process, taking months if not years to create a concise layout that can be interpreted quickly for commuters on the go.
Found at https://ift.tt/2rce925
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
On September 23rd, 1953, Walt Disney called up his friend, the painter and art director Herb Ryman, and asked him to come down to his studio. “I’m going to do an amusement park,” Disney said when Ryman arrived.
Found at https://ift.tt/2r5w2wD
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
e North Korea is are more like to favor diplomacy over war in dealing with its regime. Unfortunately, few Americans know where North Korea is.
Found at https://ift.tt/2r8E3nU
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
le looked out around them, they couldn’t imagine how far the scope of the world extended beyond what stretched out before their own eyes. Their world was the land that surrounded and fed them, and as far as they knew, it extended no further.
Found at https://ift.tt/2q6MahO
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
was carved by ancient peoples to map the area of the upper Snake River, possibly as long as 12,000 years ago. The map is believed to have been carved by the Shoshone-Bannock natives long before European contact.
Found at https://ift.tt/2q6DMBl
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
ty run-of-the-mill job these days—Google alone has scanned over 25 million titles. But some books need special treatment to make it into the digital world, and the Klencke Atlas held at the British Library took a lot of extra effort, Allison Meier at Hyperallergic reports.
Found at https://ift.tt/2r1MSzR
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Footnote #3 on p. 331 of Curiocity goes as follows: “There is only one Tube station that share no letters with the word 'mackerel'. It is mentioned on p. 297”. Try to find that nugget of trivia in any other London guidebook.
Found at https://ift.tt/2qgtVZJ
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
Found at https://ift.tt/2pRYtR1
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
MapSCII turns vectors into text-mode maps using the Braille ASCII character set. You can check out examples at ASCII Cinema, which provides animated embeds comprising of actual text! You can select, copy and paste the ASCII from it while it animates!
Found at https://ift.tt/2pJpUKM
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
One of the weirdest places in Antarctica is Blood Falls, a five-story cascade of blood-red liquid pouring from Taylor Glacier. Researchers finally traced its source: a saltwater lake millions of years old trapped under the glacier.
Found at https://ift.tt/2pytf23
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
The Inuit carve portable, waterproof, floating maps out of driftwood for use in navigating the littoral. From The Decolonial Atlas, an antidote to all the other ones: Kurdistan in Kurdish, Lakota Territory, Agricultural Maps.
Found at https://ift.tt/2p7dcUR
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Or, your maps are lying to you but so would any other map. Your maps are lying to you! They are WRONG! Everything you learned is wrong! They are instruments of imperial oppressors! All because of the “monstrosity” of a map projection, the Mercator projection.
Found at https://ift.tt/2mpYs6I
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Many of London's streets are highly polluted and this harmful air is said to contribute to thousands of deaths each year. At the heart of the problem is the vast range of vehicles on the capital's roads.
Found at https://ift.tt/2nvmEEd
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
A district will drop the Mercator projection, which physically diminished Africa and South America, for the Peters, which cut the developed world down to size A district will drop the Mercator projection, which physically diminished Africa and South America, for the Peters, which
Found at https://ift.tt/2n4fEx0
Today's maps found on the interwebs. If Every European Secession Movement Succeeded
(Source: reddit.
Found at https://ift.tt/2lZpe0E
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Legendary’s upcoming monster movie Kong: Skull Island hits theaters next week, and Google is having a bit of fun with it by plotting the film’s titular location on Google Maps. You can find the island on Google Maps, just south of the equator in the Pacific Ocean.
Found at https://ift.tt/2mZM9JM
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
One of the most common maps of the world is in fact, one of the most misleading. The problem is that the size of countries and continents have been either exaggerated or downplayed.
Found at https://ift.tt/2lSDZmH
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Transport for London has released another alternative version of the Tube map—and it’s actually really useful. The London transport manager has created a ‘Walk the Tube’ map, which shows how long it takes to totter between stations. The full-sized version is here.
Found at https://ift.tt/1iTHmHi
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
How do you create a map showing every road in the United States, with the precise location of every stop sign, all the lane markings, every exit ramp and every traffic light — and update it in real time as traffic is rerouted around construction and accidents?
Found at https://ift.tt/2lYbshY
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
More than 40 different map dealers from across the globe came to Miami recently to display their antique maps, charts, town plans and atlases.
Found at https://ift.tt/2lz1twR
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Not so very long ago, no paddler or hillwalker would head out the door without tucking a topographic map into his (or her) pack. But that was then. Today, even supposedly expert trekkers attempt winter ascents above treeline with no other navigational aid than a cell phone.
Found at https://ift.tt/2mtlgln
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
So many of the cartographers I’ve gotten to know while writing about maps seem to genuinely love their jobs. It’s one of those professions with a disproportionate number of people who are really happy to be there.
Found at https://ift.tt/2l9iIV8
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
SA Metro is a set of keys for mechanical keyboards that form colored subway lines in the classic style of the London Underground map. Three editions are planned, covering staggered, gridded and ergonomic keyboard layouts; to be absolutely clear, it lacks standard legends.
Found at https://ift.tt/2lgfTkG
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Thirty years ago, a company called Etak released the first commercially available computerized navigation system for automobiles.
Found at https://ift.tt/1LNDuD8
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Artist Matthew Rangel hikes through what looks like some of the most beautiful terrain in the world and makes these cartographic drawings based on his experiences. Lovely work. (via @djacobs)
Found at https://ift.tt/2iRZNzz
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
At The Awl, Victoria Johnson fondly remembers the books of her youth that contained extra material. Like maps. If I ruled the world, or at least a publishing company, all books would contain as much supplementary information as possible. Nonfiction, fiction — doesn’t matter.
Found at https://ift.tt/2jV6ZtD
Today's maps found on the interwebs.
Martin O’Leary is a research scientist who studies glaciers, but in his spare time, he built Uncharted Atlas, a program that auto-generates maps of fantasy lands (like from Game of Thrones or LOTR) and posts them to a Twitter account.
Found at https://ift.tt/2kZJlLr
Today's maps found on the interwebs. 
Elenco's Night 'n Day Mechanical Globe uses a system of translucent, exposed gears to rotate an internally illuminated globe that displays the seasonally adjusted, real-time night/day terminator as it spins.
from Pocket https://ift.tt/2m8iJNx
via IFTTT
Even if you're not a cartographer, when you first see a map there's almost always a gut feel for whether you like a map or whether you don't. Critiquing a map is a deeply subjective thing. You may not know why you like a map but you can tell whether the map's cartography works or it doesn't work, for you at least.
The image at the top of this post is a great example of what I mean by this. It's a map of Berlin on the inside of an umbrella. Which is a great idea and this map is one I'm very fond of, both because of the time I spent in Berlin and because it was a present from one of my old HERE Maps team. But as a map, it's far from pleasing to me; I love what's being mapped, I just think it needs a better cartographer.
So much of what appears on today's digital maps is crowdsourced. Whether it's a totally crowdsourced map such as OpenStreetMaps' or a more focused effort such as HERE's Map Creator or Google's Map Maker, the so called wisdom of the crowd is an integral part of so many maps. But what would happen if you tried to crowdsource the critiquing of maps rather than the map itself?
Next week at the the British Cartographic Society's and Society of Cartographers' Mapping Together conference crowdsourcing a set of maps to critique is exactly what's going to happen.
The idea is hopefully a simple one. We're asking people to suggest a map. It can be a good map, it can be a howlingly bad map or it can just be a favourite map. All the submissions will then be put together and shown to an unsuspecting panel of cartographers who will then critique them on the fly, there and then, with no preparation whatsoever.
I'll be chairing the whole process and unleashing the map submissions on both Ken Field and Steve Chilton to see what they make of them.
You can take part too but submitting a map, but don't do it publicly. Send me a mail with the details of your map to gromit@soc.org.uk.
Each year, the Society of Cartographers announces the Wallis Award for excellence in cartography. This year, with tongues firmly in cheek, we'll be announcing the Gromit Award for the best of the worst cartography we can get our hands on.
It should be a lot of fun and with your help it probably will be. No prizes will be given to anyone who works out the connection between the Gromit award and the Wallis Award.
Imagine for a moment you're in the city you live in; you know it like the back of your hand and yet you know there's shops, businesses or services nearby that you haven't yet come across. Or maybe you're in an unfamiliar city and you want to explore and stay away from the same old global brands that you see everywhere, in every city and on every street.
Now imagine putting this on a map.
"Ah hah!" you might say, reaching into your pocket and brandishing your smartphone. "I can do that easily" you say triumphantly as you fire up Google's or Apple's or HERE's mapping app.
But no, I'm talking about something a little more focused, a little less broad. "No worry" you say, firing up Foursquare, or Yelp or Facebook or TripAdvisor.
But the map I'm looking at right now, isn't anything like this. There's no national or global brands. There's just small, independent, probably quirky, businesses. And they're on a map. A real, tangible, hold in your hands and touch sort of map. It looks like this and it arrived on my door mat last week.
First impressions count and these first impressions are good. The Independent Map Co obviously has some serious design smarts going on but there's also a lovely little maps touch to the address label, with my home address's latitude and longitude on there as well (although I've pixelated this bit out, so you'll have to trust me on that point).
This is the first printed, tangible, map the the Independent Map Co has produced and it's for Liverpool, the home city of the founders. Sadly it's not a city I'm familar with although I'm assured that there's a London version coming soon. If first impressions are good, the packaging is even better. There care and attention to detail by the shed load going on here.
Once you get to the map itself, it continues to impress. On one side is a list of the independent businesses, broken down into categories such as Escapes, Food & Drink and Evening amonsgt others. Each business has the usual contact details but there's also an obviously carefully written summary of the business and in keeping with the map and the packaging, there's the coordinates as well. This has got artisanal written all over it, but in a good way.
On the other side is the map, the real map. There's love and attention to detail in the cartography. Everything is smooth and regular. The roads have been smoothed out and the muted colour scheme accentuates the red numbered map markers for the independent businesses. It's a map that whilst not geographically precise, allows you to focus on getting to where you want to go. It doesn't get in the way and provides the perfect backdrop for the key information you need in a map of this type; main roads, key points of interest and those red map markers. Even the scale bar is based in human terms; 4 squares on the faint graticule is approximately 5 minutes walks.
The form factor of the map hits the right note too. It's small enough to keep in a purse or bag for when you really need it. If I'm ever in Liverpool, I'm going to be sure to seek out an espresso from 53.402456°N, 2.976782°W, which is where Bold Street Coffee is located. In the meantime. I'm looking forwards to the London version to be produced so I can seek out some new coffee venues when I'm next up in the city and thanks to the map's web site I can do just that; the Espresso Room in Bloomsbury looks rather interesting.
The geo industry has always been a fairly vaguely and nebulously defined industry and it takes a brave conference organiser to try and cover everything that's geo related in a single conference. But that's what GeoBusiness tries to do and it almost succeeds. This year's conference agenda and trade booth sideshow managed to cover the whole lifecycle of all things geo, from dodging drones, centimetre accurate GPS devices and LIDAR cars outside the Business Design Centre in London, through use of geo-data, with far too much BIM for my personal tastes, through mapping and cartography and ending up with crowd sourcing mapping data and using maps for emergency responses.
This year's high points were a jaw dropping talk on using airborne remote sensing to search for illicit nuclear explosions, surely a first for any conference I've been to, if only for the title alone and Chris Sheldrick from what3words recapping his talk on addressing the world. Less than high points were conference coffee that tasted like it had been brewed the month before and wifi that recalled the heady days of a 19.2K baud rate dial up modem. Thankfully the impending coffee emergency was prevented thanks to an espresso machine in the middle of the Leica exhibition stand and some rather fine coffee shops around the conference centre.
And sandwiched neatly between a talk on how capturing geospatial data is less about data and more about knowledge and a talk about wearable GIS technology was my talk about the future of maps and what that might look like.
So in time honoured fashion, my slides and notes are below.
So hello, I’m Gary. I’m the co-founder of Malstow Geospatial and small and friendly maps, location and geo consulting company based in South West London, which means I’m currently Head of APIs for the Ordnance Survey. In previous corporate roles I’ve been head of community maps for HERE and head of geotechnology for Yahoo! I tweet, a lot, as @vicchi and I write a map blog at www.vicchi.org
There’s quite a lot of slides in this talk and some of them contain URLs. Rather than try and frantically jot them down, this is the only URL you might want to take note of. It’s where the slides and my notes will be appearing. If you go to this address right now there’s nothing there but tomorrow when I get home, this is where things will automagically appear.
This talk is all about maps and what the medium term future of maps might look like. This means me making predictions and predictions are really easy to get right. No, wait. Predictions are really hard.
Take Ken Olsen, the founder of Digital Equipment Corporation and in 1977 one of the major purveyors of mini-computers, who couldn't see why anyone would want one of these new fangled computer things in their home.
Or Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of ethernet and founder of 3-Com, who thought this whole internet thing was a passing fad
And let’s not forgive or forget Amstrad founder and apprentice firer Alan Sugar who didn’t think the iPod would be around for a long time.
So predictions are hard, but before throwing caution and professional credibility to the wind, if I’m going to be talking about the future of maps, what exactly do I mean by a map? And what angle am I approaching this future from. We’ve already heard from the inside of the geospatial industry this morning, but I’m approaching this from the consumer side, from the perspective of someone who uses explicitly uses maps and implicitly use mapping and location data. What is a map to the non-geospatial point of view. It seems a straightforward enough proposition. But there is much subtlety here …
With the exception of the hand crafted maps niche, today’s maps are in affect a very large collection of one’s and zero’s. Regardless of the way in which we use them or get our hands on them, today’s maps are unashamedly digital
Although the number of us buying printed maps is in decline, there’s still a significant market for the good old fashioned, difficult to fold up, prone to gusts of wind, disintegrating when wet, paper map. But even though the most analog form of maps arrive at the book shop or in the post, clean, crisp and freshly printed, they were still produced from a store of digital map data.
Printed maps can only hold so much information. They are a triumph of cartography that allows so much information to be represented in a static form. Printed maps don’t change, until you buy a more recent edition. But true digital maps, the ones we see and use on our laptops, on our tablets and on our phones are a many layered creation. A layer for the base map and multiple layers for all the other information we’re used to seeing on a map.
Take a standard digital map, one we’re all familiar with. I’ve used Google as an example here, but there’s many others, including MapQuest, Bing, HERE and Yahoo! In addition to the map backdrop, which is the closest analog to the printed map, you can pan and zoom these digital maps, with the mouse or with your fingers, almost as if you have an unending supply of paper maps at different scales, hidden just behind your screen. But this is also the last point where the comparison with paper maps still holds true.
Digital maps are searchable. You tap or type in what you’re looking for, either a point of interest name, an address or a post code or something a bit more nebulous, like when you’re looking for a good cup of coffee nearby.
Because a digital map has almost infinite layers, you can show and hide information which might be useful to you, such as what the traffic is like.
If driving isn’t your thing, you can also layer on public transport information, like the London Underground.
And lastly, because you’re viewing a map on some form of hardware that can work out where you are, with varying degrees of accuracy, you can also use these location sensors to position the map to where you are, right now. This is today’s digital map, a rich, many layered, sensor and position aware, searchable map. This is what it looks like today, in its many and varied forms. But what will it look like tomorrow? What 10 things will today’s map look like, do or offer in the future?
The future of maps is nearly, almost real time. If you bought a paper map, it stayed the same until either a new edition came out, until you lost your map or it wore out. Paper map update rates are measured in months or years. The data that powers today’s digital maps is updated almost as soon as its generated but that data still needs to go through accuracy checks and update cycles are measured in weeks or sometimes months.
But some data is short lived. While a base map may only change slightly from update to update, what you can show on a base map can happen and then not happen in the course of minutes. Take traffic congestion. Traffic is bad on the westbound stretch of the M25 heading towards Heathrow, which isn’t surprising. But this patch of bad traffic is caused by an accident, which someone using Waze has reported. Because Waze was recently acquired by Google, this accident report also appears on Google’s own maps.
HERE’s mobile app also shows me that traffic is bad on this stretch of the motorway but it doesn’t show me why. More importantly, Waze showed me when the accident was cleared and traffic was flowing again, but HERE was still showing congestion. The future of maps is near realtime with information being added to the map when it’s happening and removed when it’s not.
The future of maps is maps that work just as well inside your destination as they do outside when they’re getting you to your destination.
A lot of commercially available mapping data is still very much tailored to turn by turn, automotive navigation. Your car can’t get inside a building and so your map doesn’t show you how to complete that last section of your journey.
This is HERE’s map of Gatwick’s South Terminal. It doesn’t really tell me much. One building is marked as Gatwick Airport. Two buildings are marked as the South Terminal and there looks to be two train stations called Gatwick. I can see where arrivals are, but what about departures and the all important retail therapy at the duty-free stores?
Google’s map goes inside the terminal building, showing me it’s spread out over 4 floors and allows me to explore and see what’s on each floor.
Yahoo does the same, this time at the airport’s North Terminal. What’s deeply ironic is the HERE logo at the bottom right of the map. Yahoo’s maps are powered by HERE and this inside mapping is part of HERE’s platform. Which makes me wonder about why it’s not on HERE’s own mapping site? For now, indoor mapping is still a relatively rare thing, only for specially selected destinations and venues. But the future of maps are indoors, outdoors and all points in between.
The future of maps is one in which open data will either stand alongside closed, proprietary data or overtake it in terms of usage. Traditionally, mapping data was costly, both in terms of how the data is acquired and how it is licensed.
If you wanted global mapping data you went to NAVTEQ, who were acquired by Nokia in 2008 and rebranded HERE.
Or you went to TeleAtlas, who like NAVTEQ were acquired in 2008, this time by TomTom. The price and terms around licensing mapping data was one of the factors that caused Google to use its StreetView program to generate their map data and Google Map Maker to keep that data fresh and accurate.
Though it’s fair to say that this hasn’t always been a success. Some map makers feel more strongly about Android than Apple than is probably healthy.
Which means for now, Map Maker is shuttered until Google works out how to moderate crowd sourced data. The loss of Map Maker isn’t the only event which has thrown the map data industry into a turmoil of rumour and speculation either.
Nokia has announced that HERE is up for sale, with multiple parties and joint ventures being speculated on as being suitors to the heir to NAVTEQ.
TomTom too isn't without its share of speculation. While the company has just re-signed a deal to provide the mapping data for Apple’s maps, some commentators (myself included) think that TomTom getting acquired is just a matter of when rather than if.
Whenever a company is rumoured to be acquired or openly up for sale, there’s the chance for a competitor to use the resulting confusion and market inertia to its own advantage. How the sale of HERE will turn out and if TomTom gets sold remains to be seen, but open mapping data continues to grow in coverage and in uptake.
Whether it’s public domain data sets such as Natural Earth …
Open licensed data sets such as the growing range of open data that the Ordnance Survey makes available
Or the poster child of crowd sourcing that’s better known as OpenStreetMap, the availability of open data continues to increase and as you can see from the visualisation behind me, data sets such as OSM are being updated at an almost frantic pace, all over the globe. You can loose hours just watching the almost hypnotic pace of map changes. In the interests of transparency I should state that I have lost hours watching the map change. But open data and especially open map data needs to be used as well as just created.
The rumoured and possibly confirmed sale of AOL, MapQuest’s owners to Verizon seems to be behind the overhaul of MapQuest with OSM powered MapBox doing the background heavy lifting for one of the industry’s oldest surviving mapping brands.
We’re used to today’s maps being pretty accurate and we complain quite vociferously if they’re not. But the accuracy of today’s maps is bound to the accuracy offered by the way in which the data is collected. The future of maps is one which gets a significant accuracy boost.
Most of today’s positioning and a lot of today’s crowd mapping relies on the trinity of A-GPS. At the lowest end of the scale is cell tower triangulation which is less “you are here” and more “you might be somewhere around here”.
Slightly more accurate, especially in urban areas with lots of public wifi access points, is wifi triangulation.
And at the higher end of the accuracy scale is GPS, which claims accuracy to around 4 meters. But things are going to get a whole lot more accurate with QPS. QPS?
Tests of a new quantum positioning system are expected to show positional accuracy up to 1000 times greater than today’s accelerometer based location technology for those times when GPS just isn’t available, such as when you’re in a submarine or when you really, really need to know where you are to within a meter.
The future of maps is also one where we share our location. But not in a tag your location in Facebook, check in on Foursquare (sorry, check in on Swarm) or geolocate your Tweets sort of sharing. The future of maps is getting a little bit more murky with sharing location whether you like it or not.
It seems innocuous enough. Lots of data we see on maps help us gauge our feelings about a place or location. It’s one thing to know how many people have been to a place, but it’s a lot more interesting to know how many people are actually at a place right this very moment.
Last year Presence Orb tried to put this principle into practice, theorising that tracking the unique identifiers our mobile phones broadcast could show how many people are in a given place.
To trial this, Presence Orb went into partnership with a company called Renew who produced … a rubbish bin. No. Really. A rubbish bin laden with sensors that logged the MAC address of your phone’s wifi and Bluetooth (providing they’re turned on) and used this information to track your speed and your direction. But this wasn’t just a one off.
There were 12 bins placed along Cheapside in the City of London and Renew kept that information and used it to build a data set of people’s movements, without their knowledge. As the company pointed out “It provides an unparalleled insight into the past behavior of unique devices -- entry/exit points, dwell times, places of work, places of interest, and affinity to other devices -- and should provide a compelling reach data base for predictive analytics (likely places to eat, drink, personal habits etc.)”. Not everyone found this so compelling. And when questioned, Renew didn’t seem too bothered about people’s misgivings.
And they certainly didn’t seem to think they needed people’s permission either.
Renew went into administration in October 2013, two months after
Thankfully not all location based insights are as intrusive, but the future of maps is definitely one of personalisation, both for you and because of you.
Just as most people realise there’s no such thing as a free lunch, most people realise that we “pay” for free and online services with our information, such as our search history, which is used to tailor the information we see online as well as the ads that appear with that information.
This is why if I look for some coffee when I’m not signed in I get one set of results
And why if I run the same location based search when I am signed in I get different results, both in terms of relevance ordering and in terms of what I actually see. It’s OK. I get this. I’m generally happy with this.
But what happens when what you see on a map or in search listings isn’t personalised for you, it’s personalised because of where you are in the world or the political viewpoint of your government? This is where what I see on my map may not be what you see on your map. There’s many areas of the world which are … “contested”. When one government says the border is here and another government says it’s over there?
Take the Tirpani and Bara Hotii valleys for example. They sit on the disputed border between India and China with both countries proclaiming them as their territory. This means that on Google Maps, people in the US and the UK see a dotted line, indicating a disputed border, with both countries view points represented.
However Chinese users of Google Maps see the Chinese border, extending to the south-west.
While Indian users see the Indian border extending to the north-east.
Since March of last year the Crimean peninsula has been the source of a border dispute. In the US and UK, Google Maps user’s see the border as a dotted line.
Russian users see a border between Crimea and Ukraine to the north ...
... and Ukrainian users see no border at all.
So far the future of maps have all been either about maps which look like maps or the data that you put on top of those maps. But the future of maps will also have maps which have only a passing resemblance to a map.
If you’re familiar with London, you’ll probably recognise the highly stylised version of the Thames across the middle of this map of house prices and then recognise the three character codes representing the London boroughs. It’s a map of London which is only vaguely map like.
Things get less map like and more like expressionist art when you try and plot what football teams people are talking about in their geotagged Tweets. If it wasn’t for the names of Premier League football club stadiums would anyone recognise this as a map?
Almost as abstract but more recognisable as a map of somewhere is the map plotting every geotagged Tweet, everywhere. This is London by the way, together with a line of the meridian slicing cleanly through Greenwich to the right of the image.
Because the future of maps is unashamedly digital this means that those maps can come to life in many forms and the future of maps is also one of tangible maps you can hold in your hand and really touch.
The death of the printed map, printed from digital map data of course, is much overstated, at least if a visit to my local book shop is anything to go by.
You can get maps on pretty much anything you want. It’s almost as if the growth of the digital map has caused the public to fall in love with maps all over again. You can even get your birthday presents wrapped in a map. I did.
Of course, tangible maps don’t have to be printed on paper. They can be printed on other more durable materials and can even be personalised, as SplashMaps are doing. I did
You can even put a map on your wall and try and make map aficionados of the young and impressionable. I did.
And as a cursory search for “map” on Etsy the other day shows, you can put a map on anything. Over 141 thousand anythings to be more precise.
The penultimate future of maps is that of finally having maps that really are truly global.
We’ve come a long way since 1510 when the Hunt-Lenox Globe became one of the two known cases of HIC SUNT DRACONES or “here be dragons” denoting unexplored territory. Today, all of our maps are global, surely?
Maybe not. This is a map of what the authorities euphemistically term an “unplanned settlement” in Tanzania’s Dar es Salaam. I’ve been here and there’s definitely a lot more on the ground than this somewhat sparse map would have you believe.
This version of Tandale’s map is a little better. There’s some points of interest and some of the roads have names, but it’s still not showing the real picture.
Which looks something like this. In 2002 a census showed that over 45,000 people lived in this enclave which is surrounded by the rest of Dar es Salaam. Surely these people deserve a better map. To be fair to other map data providers, their maps are still strongly tied to the need for turn-by-turn automotive navigation and that means some parts of the world will never have good map coverage.
But crowd sourced mapping projects, based on OSM, are fleshing out the map to show what is really there. It may be classed as a slum but from personal experience I can state that Tandale is an amazing place and it deserves to be put on the map.
Projects such as Missing Maps …
and the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team are doing just that and, in mapping the under-mapped and the unmapped, are really helping to map the world.
Which brings me to the final future of maps, which really underpins all the other 9. The future of maps is information and data.
The map we see with our own eyes is but the tip of a massive information and data iceberg that lies below the surface of today’s digital maps. There’s only so much information you can show on a map, even with amazing cartography and almost infinite layers overlaying the map. The future of maps is all about information and is producing not only tomorrow’s digital maps but also ways of using mapping data that until now have never even been considered before.
So thank you for listening; I hope you've enjoyed my very personal and purely subjective view of what the future of maps might look like.
Last month, in response to the news that Uber had acquired LBS platform provider deCarta, Marc Prioleau penned an article asking is this the start of a mapping war?
A few days ago, Bloomberg announced news that Nokia is looking to sell off HERE, the maps business forged from the, sometimes unwilling, union of NAVTEQ and Nokia's Ovi Maps. Potential buyers for HERE include ... Uber.
This looks like either a skirmish before an all out map war offensive or this is the start of that mapping war.
But why would a mobile car booking application want to buy another mapping platform and mapping service? The answer is, to my mind, simple and to paraphrase Marc, (Uber) want to own their location assets. With deCarta, Uber now has the platform to do geospatial calculations, such as routing, without relying on a third party. But even with deCarta's platform, Uber are still missing something. Geospatial and mapping platforms need to be fed and fed regularly with data to keep them current. With Uber reportedly eyeing up HERE, the value in such an acquisition is less about HERE's mapping platform and much more about HERE's mapping data. Whether Uber knows about the cost of keeping that data current remains to be seen; maybe we'll see Uber (re)launching their own location platform as a way of trying to generate revenue to offset those upkeep costs.
This isn't the first time this has happened in the maps and location industry. In 2009, Google dropped TeleAtlas (now owned by TomTom) in favour of their own map data, gleaned from their Street View project. Although this was initially in the US only, Google has since expanded their own global map outside of the United States. As with Uber, Google sees the value in owning as much of the location platform, including the data, as they can.
Although buying your own location data provider doesn't come cheap it also isn't prohibitively expensive either. Consider that in 2007 Nokia acquired NAVTEQ for a reported $8.1 billion. In August of 2014, unnamed analysts valued HERE at $6 billion should Nokia look to sell of that part of the business. Now Bloomberg are citing a valuation for HERE at around $2.1 billion. Now consider that Uber is thought to have a war chest of just under $6 billion. Even if paying the asking price, Uber will be able to write a cheque for HERE with relative ease.
Of course, Uber may not end up owning HERE. There are other potential buyers with equally large war chests and that's before you look at private equity firms.
If this really is a full scale map war, where will it spread next? Accidental casualties will probably be Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon. The former two web giants got out of the mapping business and outsourced their map platforms to HERE, which also powers the maps for Amazon's Kindle Fire range. MapQuest is also powered by HERE's data and together with Yahoo and Microsoft are probably looking for a plan B for their maps right now, if they're not already doing so.
Attention may fall next to TomTom, who acquired TeleAtlas in 2008 for just under €3 billion. Since the announcement in 2012 that TomTom will be providing the underlying data for Apple's mapping and location services, TomTom have remained quiet and if there has been any growth for the company or large deals, they've been struck in private and both parties are keeping their own counsel.
So while it looks likely that the days of an independent global mapping provider, albeit one with a focus on the automotive industries need for turn-by-turn navigation, are numbered, who will end up the winner of the map wars?
Will it be Google continuing to dominate the web and mobile mapping space? Will Uber or whoever acquires HERE or whoever finally acquires TomTom turn the mapping platforms inwards or will they keep them running for developers to use? Maybe the map wars will be the stimulus that OpenStreetMap finally needs to shrug off their licensing issues and to take its place as the sole global mapping provider.
Only time will tell, but I predict that these times are going to get a whole lot more interesting as the battles, skirmishes and melees of the map wars continue.
Disclaimer: I worked at Nokia Maps and subsequently HERE Maps between 2010 and 2013 and remain a Nokia shareholder; no insider secrets were divulged or harmed in the writing of this post.
Keep Calm and Make Maps via the Keep Calm-o-Matic.
When I first made the Vaguely Rude Places Map in February of 2013 I had no idea what was going to happen. Since then it's gone viral multiple times, been the subject of three conference talks, talked about on two radio stations, been covered in loads of newspapers and viewed millions of times. I still find it wryly amusing that the most successful map I've made to date has had nothing to do with my day job.
But two years is a long time in geo-technology and the original map just feels ... tired. So I decided it was time for a face lift and while I was at it, to incorporate the Italian version of the map that Simone Cortesi forked from the original one. Apparently places can be rude in languages besides (British) English.
So I reforked Simone's Italian version and updated the Rude Places map based on Bryan McBride's excellent Bootleaf. The resultant reworking of the map is now up and live and looks a whole lot slicker than the original did. Thanks to Bryan's code, it's now browsable and searchable and you can flick between the original set of English places and their Italian counterparts with a single click of the mouse or tap of the screen.
I've mentioned this before but sincere thanks and credit is due to the following people for helping make the map, both deliberately and inadvertently.
To paraphrase the late, great Terry Pratchett, sometimes making a map is the most fun you can have by yourself.
(P)rude(ntial) by Vladimer Shioshvili on Flickr, CC-BY-SA
Somewhere around 1510 what is now known as the Lenox Globe was made. Apart from being either the second or third oldest globe in existence, the Lenox Globe is infamous for the first appearance of the Latin Phrase HIC SVNT DRACONES, which is today loosely translated as here be dragons. This is probably not a reference to the precise location of dragons, but is thought to be a reference to the Kingdom of Dragoian in Sumatra which was noted by Marco Polo during his travels. Nowadays the phrase is commonly taken to mean "here is stuff we don't know about or which hasn't happened yet".
All of which reminds me of a conversation I had with a member of the finance team in a previous job; the company name is redacted to prevent embarrassment. The conversation went something like this ... "So, when will this map of yours be finished?" "It won't; the world is always changing". "Well I need a date for reporting against, so can I say the map will be finished at the end of the financial year?"
Honour was satisfied. I put across my point and finance got a date for when the map would be finished. Which is course it wasn't, isn't and never will be.
Which brings me to a great example of why the map will never be finished and that started taking place in December of last year when then Tongan volcano on the island of Hunga Tonga woke up. This is what Hunga Tonga looks like today on Google Maps.
Hunga Tonga is comprised of two islands and this map is pretty accurate up to July of 2014, as this Pléiades satellite image shows.
But in December, the map started to change and it's continued to change rapidly and dramatically as you can see from this follow up image taken two months ago. The eruption of the volcano has not only stripped all the vegetation off of the islands but the left hand island has sprouted a whole new section of land with a clearly smoking crater, filled with a sulphurous lake. All in all, Hunga Tonga has added another 500m of new land, reaching up to 250m above sea level.
Spectacular though this is, none of this is surprising as Tonga sits on the infamous ring of fire, where tectonic plates are being dragged beneath each other, making a ring like zone which is home to around 90% of the world's earthquakes and around 75% of the world's active and dormant volcanoes.
For now, this part of the map needs to be updated. I'm not singling Google out for not updating their map, everyone's map now needs updating and will continue to need to be updated. The map will never be finished. This is one more part of the world where Hic Sunt Dracones doesn't apply any more. But maybe, just maybe it does and the sulphurous fumes wafting from Hunga Tonga's crater aren't really from a volcano but from a sleeping dragon hidden just out of sight. Maybe here might be dragons.
A hat tip is due to my wife Alison for pointing this out to me; being married to a map geek means she knows a good maps story when she sees one.
Map image from Google Maps. Pléiades imagery courtesy of Airbus Defence & Space. Your Satnav is wrong by Alister on Flickr, CC-BY-NC-ND
CartoBot is a small robot who lives in the office in my loft. He accidentally achieved consciousness when his charging cable was accidentally plugged into a Raspberry PI and he started to look for information. His only source was my library of books on maps and so CartoBot became obsessed with them. He now spends his days sitting on my home wifi connection and scouring the web for maps and mapping related stuff, which he Tweets about through his very own Twitter account.
None is this is true. Sorry CartoBot, it's just not. Cartobot is a Twitterbot, written in Node.js, that searches for Tweets about maps and cartography and also scans my GetPocket queue for bookmarks tagged with maps and Tweets about these as well.
Why does CartoBot do this? Because I'd always wanted to write a Twitterbot and making one that Tweeted about maps and cartography seemed fitting. I'd also wanted to experiment with Node and this turned out to be a good excuse doing just that.
If you follow CartoBot on Twitter he won't follow you back and for now at least, if you Tweet to him he doesn't know how to reply. This may change in the future. But he will follow you if you Tweet about maps and use the #map, #maps or #cartography hash tags and he finds one of your Tweets and retweets it.
At the moment, CartoBot is sitting on one of my servers and waking up every 2 hours and searching for stuff. The search algorithm he uses is pretty simplistic and every so often throws up something totally inappropriate so should be considered very much a work in progress.
So far, he's Tweeted or retweeted just over 800 times and has over 500 followers. He doesn't take up any appreciable CPU, disk space or bandwidth, so CartoBot won't be going anywhere for the foreseable future. Let's see how this pans out.
Robbie The Robot: Into The Unknown by JD Hancock, CC-BY
At the beginning of 2013 Google launched Google Maps Engine Lite, a simpler and easier to use version of their commercial Maps Engine, which was designed as a successor to Google's My Maps feature. In essence, My Maps and GME were web based, simplified GIS tools, allowing a user to create maps with overlays of their own data. Call it GIS for people who don't know about GIS if you will. Maybe GME never got the traction Google hoped for but they have now announced that GME will be shutting down in a year's time. What happens next for GME users and what alternatives are there? Who will benefit from the demise of GME?
There's 3 likely contenders to the throne of the GIS-lite approach of GME; ArcGIS Online, CartoDB and MapBox via their new Turf product.
There’s much irony here, given that GME was originally positioned as a web savvy alternative to traditional GIS platforms. Both Esri and Mapbox will need a significant advertising push and awareness campaign to attract GME emigres. CartoDB on the other hand is positioning itself as the official successor to GME with the launch of CartoDB for Google Maps Platform, apparently developed in conjunction with Google.
I don’t think they’ll be any one winner and all of these wannabe successors to GME will likely benefit though CartoDB's official seal of Google approval will tip the balance in their favour.
But there other contenders here as well …
There's iSpatial, a Google Maps and Google Earth based product, which may make this attractive for people who want to continue the Google experience and look and feel.
The similarly named eSpatial is another Google Maps powered mapping platform with GME style functionality
At one end of the spectrum is uMap, an OSM based layering tool and platform, while pricier options include Maptitude and Mango.
Finally honourable mention should be made of Geojson.io, very much GeoJSON focused as the name suggests, but an easy visualisation tool for GeoJSON data.
Whilst these products may get some customers, they’ve already been competing with GME for users and for business, so I don’t see a massive uptake for these.
Finally of course, there’s Google themselves … users with some technical ability could replicate some of the functionality of GME with Google’s other maps and geo APIs and products.
While GME may be biting the dust, there's a whole host of alternatives available for users looking to emigrate from Google's platform and who will carry on visualising their spatial data, blissfully unable that they're actually using a GIS platform.
Dead End by Alan English, CC-BY-NA
Not all Geographic Information conferences are created equal. A great proof point for this is IRLOGI, the Irish Association for Geographic Information. Today I've been in Dublin at their annual GIS Ireland 2014 conference, which is in its 19th year. I'd been invited to give one of the opening keynotes; who could resist such an invitation?
Held in the hidden conference centre that nestles unassumingly under the Chartered Accountants of Ireland's offices, GIS Ireland ticked all the boxes. The conference team had obviously worked hard to ensure that there was a wide range of topics being discussed and managed to avoid the "same people, same talks, same topics" trap that some conferences fall into. The coffee was hot and plentiful and the wifi (almost) stayed up and running all the time.
The starting point for the talk I have was an article called Today's Mapping Industry Really Does Need To Please All People, All The Time, which I'd written for GPS Business News in September. As there was an article length limit, I couldn't go into the detail I think this topic merited, but a conference talk is a different beast. This is what that article morphed into. This is B2*.
Welcome to B2*; the new reality of the mapping industry ...
So hello, I’m Gary. I’m the co-founder of Malstow Geospatial and small and friendly maps, location and geo consulting company based in South West London, which means I’m currently Head of APIs for the Ordnance Survey. In previous corporate roles I’ve been head of community maps for HERE and head of geotechnology for Yahoo!
... I tweet, a lot, as @vicchi ...
... and I write a map blog at www.vicchi.org
There’s quite a lot of slides in this talk and some of them contain URLs. Rather than try and frantically jot them down, this is the only URL you might want to take note of. It’s where the slides and my notes will be appearing. If you go to this address right now there’s nothing there but tomorrow when I get home, this is where things will automagically appear.
The starting point for this talk is an article I wrote recently for GPS Business News in response to what I perceived as a growing trend that the mapping industry is in a wonderful and safe position and that everything is awesome … so I did some research of my own and found some wonderfully big looking numbers being tossed around
75% of people are using some form of location services on their smartphones, according to Pew Research.
Markets and Markets value the entire location based services market at $40 billion, albeit in 5 year’s time
Berg values just the advertising section of LBS at $15 billion in 4 year’s time Obviously we’re in the midst of a mapping and location boom
The trivial amounts of $2.76 billion that TomTom paid for TeleAtlas ...
... and the $8.1 billion that Nokia paid for Navteq in 2008 are obviously bargain basement. That’s a lot of money and a lot of market share. Surely?
Looking at all of these big numbers it seems obvious that if you’re a mapping company the sole path to success is just to license your data and then head to the bar, safe and secure that you’re in an unassailable position.
Seriously? Really?
That can’t be right. I wanted to take a look at this unassailable position. Indulge me if you will …
Firstly, I want to set some context for what today’s mapping industry looks like and why it looks the way it does
As a species we’ve been making maps for a while. This isn’t the earliest map but it’s one of the earliest that’s recognisable as a map; it’s of the world as the Babylonians thought of it. Babylon is in the centre of the map and there's seven triangular islands, 3 of which are missing due to damage, in the "river of bitter water", or the sea.
No-one knows who made the Babylonian map, but we know this map, which goes under the delightful Latin title of Hemispheriu[m] ab aequinoctiali linea, ad circulu[m] Poli Arctici, (literally Hemisphere of the equinoctial line, to the circle of the Arctic pole) was made by Cornelius de Jode in 1593 for an atlas which was published by his father. This is a prime example of a map as art, but this art came at a price. You needed to be wealthy to commission such a map and such a map was often given as a notional gift to the rich and powerful to curry favour or was commissioned by one of the ruling elite. This is maps for rulers. Quite often the map was a blank canvas, waiting to be discovered and filled in, it certainly was the case when Sir Walter Raleigh undertook his voyages of exploration for Queen Elizabeth I and maybe the process by which this happened looked something like this …
Business marketing terms weren’t around in 1593, at least not that we’d probably recognise today, but I think you could classify de Jode’s map as B2G, business-to-government, as the kings, queens and other members of the ruling elite who either commissioned maps or were the beneficiaries of them were as close to government as you’d get in those days
But by the middle of the 20th Century, maps may still have been under governmental control but they were also for the masses as well, with the likes of you and me being able to buy maps and go out and explore the wonders of the countryside or navigate to unfamiliar parts of the country or even beyond, to what was termed, at least when I was growing up, as “abroad” or on the “continent”.
These sort of maps were designed for the consumer and fall within the purview of what’s now termed business-to-consumer, or B2C
While we tend to think of digital maps as a relatively modern invention, maps have been data for a long time, pretty much ever since we stopped engraving them by hand. Though there’s a lot of press coverage about vector maps being the latest thing, maps were vectors that then got converted into rasters. And of course, it you have data, other people may want that data
They may even be willing to pay money to license that data, and so we have maps as data and maps as a business-to-business transaction.
Life was simple. The maps industry knew where it was. We went out and made maps from mapping data. We did this under government authority as B2G, we licensed the data to other businesses as B2B and we sold maps to the public as B2C.
But all things can, must and do change and the disruptive change to the maps industry started in the mid to late 1980s
In 1984 a company called TeleAtlas formed in the Netherlands and the following year another company called Navtech formed in Silicon Valley. Both made rudimentary digital map data and TeleAtlas’s data would form part of ETAK, the first in-car navigation system.
In 1989 the rollout of the US controlled Global Positioning System starts. These days we know this as GPS.
In 1991, at Cern in Switzerland a man called Tim Berners-Lee started to link a web of documents together and on this very NeXT cube (formed by Steve Jobs after he’d been ousted from Apple), the first webserver and web site was born and the World Wide Web officially started.
Up until 2000 there was two sorts of GPS signal – a degraded civilian one and and an accurate military one. This difference stopped in May 2000. As a result GPS starts to become widespread in civilian devices, leading to the explosion of personal satnav devices and the presence of GPS in our smartphones
And talking of smartphones, whilst they were first thought of an patented in 1971, mass availability and adoption of these hybrid mobile phone, network enabled computers didn’t really take off until the turn of the Millennium
And in 2005 Google finally made their unofficial API for Google Maps, which had launched earlier that year, publicly available and Yahoo! quickly followed with their maps API.
So with map data, maps APIs, GPS and maps on the web and on our smartphone a decision inversion occurred. Technology decisions which had previously been made by the CTO and then percolated downwards to GI and software engineers, were now being made by those same GI professionals and percolating upwards.
This was the birth of a new type of business transaction, B2D or business-to-developer. Availability of map data, ease of use of APIs and friendly licensing and terms of use became critical to a mapping organisation’s continued success.
All of this made me think of a theory about the distribution channels and relationships that mapping organisations have. My theory goes something like this … in order to continue to survive and grow, just having one channel or relationship isn’t enough
B2G alone isn’t enough
B2B alone isn’t enough
B2C alone isn’t enough
B2D alone isn’t enough
You really need to please all people, all of the time, you need to be B-to-everything, which I’m shortening to B-to-* because it’s shorter to say and sounds vaguely snappier
To try and prove my theory I looked at some of the key players in the mapping and mapping data space and tried to categorise them. Would the theory hold for one category, for all of them or maybe there’s some specific category where the theory holds true, albeit in a tenuous way
The first category I termed “this is my map data making”, in other words, organisations that actually go out and collect the raw geospatial data that’s the key ingredient in making a map. Then there’s “not my map data making”; these organisations make maps but use other company’s map data, usually licensed data. And then finally there’s “accidental map data making”; organisations that have ended up creating mapping data almost accidentally or as a beneficial side effect to their main endeavours.
This is the first category of companies; those that make their own maps
First up is Amsterdam based TomTom, the owners of TeleAtlas.
There’s obviously a B2C offering from TomTom, driven (pun fully intended) by TeleAtlas’ data, as this is what the company is probably best known for.
The B2C flavour continues with paid apps on two of the main smartphone platforms.
And on the B2B side there’s licensing TeleAtlas data ...
... as well as a map platform that caters for the B2D side of things, as long as you’re a paying licensee
TeleAtlas/TomTom data are the underpinnings for Apple’s maps on iOS and on OS X as well as Google’s maps for those areas where Google hasn’t yet made their own maps as a by product of gathering StreetView data.
So TomTom's B2* scorecard looks something like this ...
Then there’s Chicago based Navteq who were acquired by Nokia and now form part of Berlin based HERE.
There’s a strong B2C presence for HERE, with a consumer maps portal, ...
the default maps app for Windows Phone ...
... a deal with Samsung to provide maps which aren’t Google’s on Android phones and rumours of an equivalent for iOS at some point.
B2B is also a strong showing for HERE, signing platform deals to run maps for big enterprises ...
including Yahoo ...
and Microsoft’s Bing.
And finally there’s a B2D presence with a whole suite of developer APIs, some freemium, some tied to NAVTEQ data licensing.
Here's HERE's B2* scorecard ...
Moving away from global mapping providers, let’s take a look at where I’m currently consulting, the UK’s Ordnance Survey, which is probably the oldest mapping agency there is, being in existence since 1792
As an executive branch of the UK government, the OS is trying hard to cover all the bases.
There’s the printed consumer maps side of the business which seems to be as British as long summer evenings, weak tea, cricket and warm beer.
There’s also a strong B2D showing with a variety of APIs, which I’m working hard on expanding and improving.
And there’s data, loads of data which is licensed to other businesses as well as being made available to central and local government agencies via the UK Public Service Mapping Agreement.
The Ordnance Survey's B2* scorecard looks something like this ...
That’s category number 1 dealt with, now let’s look at category number 2, the “not my data” brigade who take mapping data and make maps and services with it under license
It probably comes as no surprise that the first in this category is Google, the company that, probably unfairly, seems to be synonymous with web maps and mobile maps. It’s true that Google are slowly making their own base map as a convenient by product to StreetView, but they are also licensees of a staggering amount of data, including TomTom’s.
Google tries hard to tick all the B2 boxes. There’s a consumer maps site ...
... and mobile maps which are closely integrated with Google’s other core business, that of selling search advertising.
There’s also a strong developer offering as well, giving “free” (in very inverted commas) access to maps, geocoding and a whole slew of other geospatial services.
Here's Google's B2* scorecard ...
Launched in 1996, next up is MapQuest. 1996 doesn’t seem that long ago but MapQuest is a literal veteran of online and digital maps
As a TomTom/TeleAtlas licensee, MapQuest has a strong consumer offering, albeit one with some quirks. There’s a consumer map portal, which isn’t powered by TomTom data at all, rather it’s driven entirely by OpenStreetMap.
MapQuest’s B2C credentials extend to a competitor to Google Maps amongst others being available on iOS, on Android, on Windows Phone and on Amazon’s Kindle Fire as well.
It looks quite an impressive offering, maps, GPS, traffic notifications and turn by turn navigation ...
... but sadly it’s a US only affair so I can't download it or try it out as I don't have a US credit card.
There’s also a strong B2D showing as well, and MapQuest are unique here in offering two identical sets of developer APIs, one driven by TomTom data and one by OpenStreetMap.
This is what MapQuest's B2* scorecard looks like ...
And finally in this category is Apple. The Cupertino based company is a relative latecomer to the maps game, relying on Google for their maps until the launch of Apple Maps in 2012
It’s fair to say that the first versions of Apple Maps felt rushed. With odd visualisations of melting bridges, showing the wrong location of the Apple Store in Sydney, Australia, marking an entire city as a hospital, misclassifying a nursery as an airport, and identifying the nearest petrol station to be as far as 76 miles away from the user's location.
But Apple Maps have iterated rapidly and improved significantly ...
... and thanks to the acquisition of C3, they have a very impressive 3D offering and a captive developer audience in the OS X and iOS operating systems.
This is Apple's B2* scorecard ...
And finally there’s the accidental geospatial data companies.
The best example of which is probably New York’s Foursquare.
As a consumer recommendation site, Foursquare gets things impressively right.
There’s also two consumer mobile apps, the original Foursquare and the new Swarm, though many people, myself included, think Foursquare isn’t nearly as much fun as it used to be, especially since the gamification elements of checking in and competing to be mayor of a place have been phased out.
But the side effect of all of this has been a vital part of the mobile location based ecosystem and that’s Foursquare’s places data which power so many of today’s LBS and LBMS offerings.
This data set, an almost byproduct of their core business, has immense value that is now slowly being licensed and recognised.
This is Foursquare's B2* scorecard ...
There’s also an elephant in the room, an obvious omission that I’ve not talked about, and that’s OpenStreetMap. Now I know that OSM is a community and not a company or an organisation but it rightly deserves examining in terms of B2*
Since its inception in 2004, OSM has grown and grown. Not just in the amount of the world that’s been mapped, nor just in the amount of mapping data that this has generated (which currently weighs in at just under 500 GB). OSM is probably the definitive exemplar of a crowd sourcing project and it’s now starting to attract some heavyweight business attention, both directly and indirectly through the ecosystem of companies offering and monetising OSM based services.
In addition to using TomTom data, Apple are also using OSM, albeit from a vintage prior to OSM’s change of licensing from CC-BY-SA to ODbL.
Foursquare’s maps are OSM based ...
OpenCage are building geo services on OSM data ...
and both Craigslist ...
and Wikipedia are using OSM maps.
Then there’s MapBox ...
and CartoDb, both building a business on OSM.
So this is OpenStreetMap's B2* scorecard ...
So does my theory of B2* being the new reality for the maps industry make sense? Does it hang together coherently? Obviously I think it does, for several reasons, but also that even if you’re a mapping company that manages to cover all of the bases that B2* currently stands for, that’s not necessarily grounds for congratulating ourselves and resting back on our laurels.
As some of the early market leaders got acquired, there were fears around uncertainly of map data supply and the explosive growth of the dashboard top satnav box slowed to a trickle, supplanted by free offerings on people’s smartphones. Surely there would be winners and losers and this would affirm my theory of B2*. Maybe. None of the players in this space have gone out of business … yet. But it’s too early to be sure and when disruptive change happens in an industry it happens fast and it’s easy to be complacent and not spot a trend.
Accuracy always matters for a map, not just for how accurate the map and its data is, but also for where the map is. Consider this for a moment, the duo of TeleAtlas/TomTom and Navteq/HERE have a pedigree steeped in the automotive industry, in satnav and turn-by-turn navigation. Their maps are road heavy, sometimes to the detriment of other forms of transport. The national and cadastral mapping agencies, including Britain’s Ordnance Survey, on the other hand, map everywhere within their territory regardless of whether it’s a road network, a metropolitan or urban area or the remotest and sparsely populated areas. And then there’s OpenStreetMap which maps everything it can, anywhere it can. Accuracy definitely matters and all the organisations I’ve talked about claim to have accurate maps and most of the time these days they have.
In addition to accuracy, depth also matters but several mapping companies have discovered to their cost that not everyone needs depth. Classic B2B players, such as utility companies and fixed lines communications providers definitely need depth, as do governments, especially when it comes to marking out electoral boundaries or calculating taxation. But not all use cases demand the most detailed map.
As I mentioned earlier, disruption happens and it happens in such a way that the market leaders often don’t notice. Any company active in the mapping space ignores the encroachment of Google into it’s heartland or the uptake and adoption of OpenStreetMap at their peril.
All the companies that make their own mapping data, that’s TeleAtlas/TomTom, Navteq/HERE and the Ordnance Survey rightly pride themselves on the accuracy of their map and the depth of their map (in other words how detailed the map is). For a lot of use cases, maybe for emergency service routing, deep and accurate is what you need. But for other use cases, you just need good enough and good enough either comes for free or at a substantial discount.
So who wins and who looses. All the companies try hard to tick as many of the B2* boxes as they can. But there will be casualties. Google’s march towards domination seems unstoppable, but any company can make a wrong move or ignore an upstart competitor snapping at their heels. TomTom and HERE rely on big licensing deals to justify the costs of map data acquisition but this is the classic long tail model in action, the head is mined out and the tail is starting to be explored. Those big licensing deals are getting fewer and fewer and come with less revenue. HERE’s deal with Samsung is a clever move which may just be enough for a company which effectively was acquired for $9 billion and is now valued at $6 billion. There’s little doubt in my mind that owning your own mapping data gives you a position of strength and stability that being a licensee just can’t. Of all the companies I’ve mentioned, MapQuest gives me the most concern. They continue to be reliant on licensed data, even though they’ve embraced OpenStreetMap, and licensed data costs continue to rise. I have to wonder if their parent company, AOL, will make a decision that there’s just not enough revenue coming in and will decide to close MapQuest down. For companies lucky enough to continue to own their data, the challenge is no longer to make a map or keep it fresh and accurate. The challenge and the reality is to expose the map and the map data to as many channels as they can. This is what B2* is all about. It means own your data, monetise it, make a balance between free and paid offerings and keep making your map ubiquitous.
In English, null means nothing, nil, empty or void. In computing, null is a special value for nothing, an empty value. In geography, null tends to be what you get when you've been unable to geocode a place or an address and haven't checked the geocoder's response. What you end up with is a pair of coordinates of 0 degrees longitude and 0 degrees latitude, a point somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, south of Ghana and west of Gabon. It's here that you'll also find Null Island, if you look hard enough.
The website for the Republic of Null Island (like no place on earth) says this about the island's location ...
The Republic of Null Island is one of the smallest and least-visited nations on Earth. Situated where the Prime Meridian crosses the Equator, Null Island sits 1600 kilometres off the western coast of Africa.
... but Null Island is an in joke created by Nate Kelso and Tom Patterson as part of the Natural Earth data set in January 2011.
It's totally fictitious and is designed as a gentle poke in the ribs for people who don't check the return value from their geocoder and end up putting a pin on a web map in the middle of the ocean. As Natural Earth's release notes mention ...
WARNING: A troubleshooting country has been added with an Indeterminate sovereignty class called Null Island. It is a fictional, 1 meter square island located off Africa where the equator and prime meridian cross. Being centered at 0,0 (zero latitude, zero longitude) it is useful for flagging geocode failures which are routed to 0,0 by most mapping services. Aside: “Null Islands” exist for all local coordinate reference systems besides WGS84 like State Plane (and global if not using modern Greenwich prime meridian). Null Island in Natural Earth is scaleRank 100, indicating it should never be shown in mapping.
Look carefully enough, especially on web sites that handle large amounts of data from third parties and which helpfully supply a map for some additional context, such as property sites, who should really know better and Null Island may just appear before your eyes.
Take Whathouse.com for example, who have a 3 bedroom property near Enfield in North East London for sale, yours for just £995,000. Whathouse helpfully provide a map tab on their property listings to that if you're not familiar with where the N9 postal district of London is, you can find out.
This is in London, the capital of the United Kingdom, which as far as I know hasn't suffered massive continental drift to end up in the middle of the ocean.
Zoom the map out and you can see why this unique property seems to be alone in the middle of the ocean; it's really on Null Island. Either that or someone hasn't been checking their geocoding results properly. A bad geocoding result is almost probably definitely the reason for this little geographic faux pas, but a part of me likes to think that Null Island really does exist and you really can spend close to a million pounds securing a 3 bedroom apartment on one of geography's most tongue in cheek places.
I like maps. Even if you've never read posts on this site, the name "Mostly Maps" should probably be a giveaway. What you may not know is that I don't really like musicals. Now granted I've seen Rent and Spamalot, but that's because Alison and I were in New York and the former was recommended by one of my best friends and for the latter I'm a massive Python fan. Maps and musicals aren't something that go together. But that may be about to change.
Cast your mind back to the dawn of history, before mobile phones were smart and when GPS was just an Australian rugby club, which is sometime in the very early 2000's. If you lived in London, your essential navigation guide wasn't a maps app, but a copy of the A-Z as the Geographer's A-Z Street Atlas was better known. This was the map you carried around London rather than a mapping app on your phone. I still have several editions on the bookshelf at home, each one being bought when its predecessor got so dog eared as to be unusable or just started falling apart.
The probably apocryphal backstory is that the A-Z's founder, Phyllis Pearsall got lost in 1935 following a 1919 Ordnance Survey map on the way to a party and decided to make her own map. To do this she got up at 5.00 AM and spent 18 hours a day walking the 3,000 odd miles of London's 23,00 or so streets. This tale is disputed, with Peter Barber, the British Library's Head Of Maps, being quoted as saying "The Phyllis Pearsall story is complete rubbish, there is no evidence she did it and if she did do it, she didn’t need to". Given that Pearsall's father was a map maker who produced and sold maps of London, he's got a point.
But regardless of the accuracy of the legend around Phyllis Pearsal, it's a great story, especially for those of us who used the A-Z each and every day around London. But is it a musical story? Neil Marcus, Diane Samuels and Gwyneth Herbert seem to think so and they're the team behind The A-Z Of Mrs. P, a musical about London's iconic street atlas and its founder that's currently playing at the Southwark Playhouse. Reviews have been mixed, but anything that throws some attention on the A-Z is welcome in my book, even if it is a musical.
You may have noticed that at the foot of each post I always try to provide source and attribution for photos or images that I use. I think I'm going to have to expand this to include the inspiration for each post. In this particular case, credit is due to Alison. If it's not a sign of true love when your wife texts you to tell you about something map related she's seen, then I don't know what is. I guess you don't spend nearly 15 years being married to a self professed map nerd without knowing a good map related story when you see one.
The A-Z Of Mrs. P poster by Su Blackwell.
It's easy to get stuck in a mental rut, to think that everyone thinks and feels the same way you do about a subject. But sometimes you need to get away and visit another country and another culture to find out that maybe there's more than one way of looking at a subject. For me that subject is, unsurprisingly, maps and the other country was India.
Some countries are easier to map than others. Up to the end of the Cold War, it was commonplace for the UK's Ordnance Survey to not show prohibited places, although this practice has been effectively stopped due to the widespread availability of satellite imagery. Further afield, there's contested borders and territorial disputes which makes mapping some administrative boundaries something of a challenge; a proof of the old adage about pleasing some people some of the time but not all people all of the time.
It's easy to think that not mapping an area is a thing of the past. That we can and should map everywhere. That mapping is simply the combination of human effort, a bit of technology and a lot of data. Indeed OpenStreetMap's beginner's guide states upfront that the data you add improves the free world map for everyone. But as I found out, in India, there's a lot more subtlety and nuance behind this admirable creed.
Firstly there's the act of mapping itself. As with pre-Cold War Britain (and to be fair, some parts of Britain today), India has placed restrictions on what can and cannot appear on a map. When working for Nokia's HERE Maps, I ran a program to use crowd mapping to improve the company's maps in India and came across these restrictions first hand. My point here is not to agree or disagree with a government's stance on mapping restrictions but merely to point out that they exist.
But it's not just the government who would prefer you not to map places, it's the people as well in some cases. According to recent figures, India has a population of around 1.27 billion people; of these, over 65 million live in slums. Sadly this wasn't a shock; I'd been well prepared for slums from my visit to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania at the end of 2012.
In Dar es Salaam, you map slums to help the occupants find vital facilities; fresh water, sanitation, health care and so on. You use the map to bring the slum to the authorities attention so they do something about it. Making a map is vital. But not necessarily so in India. Indian slums are hidden in plain sight. Everyone knows they're there, but they don't always bring attention to themselves. Putting a slum on the map runs the risk of bringing some potential prime real estate land to the attention of an unscrupulous property developer; some of whom have been known to raze a slum to the ground overnight and displacing the residents through the judicious use of bulldozers.
Another subtlety that doesn't apply in the United Kingdom are the locations of the Cheel Ghar in Indian cities, which translates to Tower of Silence in English. These are the circular raised structures where Parsi followers of the Zoroastrian faith leave their dead and let exposure to the sun and birds of prey reduce the body to bare bones. Originally these towers were outside the boundaries of the city, but the rapid growth of India's metropolitan areas have engulfed the Cheel Ghar, leaving them as small forested oases inside the urban sprawl. Even if you know where they are, and I walked past one without knowing it until it was pointed out to me, putting these sacred places on a map would not be deemed acceptable by adherents of that faith. Just because you can map something, doesn't always mean you should.
But even if you make an accurate and detailed map, how do you cope with the vagaries and eccentricities of the Indian addressing system? I asked someone at the GeoMob meets GeoBLR meetup we ran in Bangalore how they'd geocode (turn addresses into longitude and latitude) a batch of a thousand or so addresses. The answer was blunt and succinct ... "Geocode that many addresses? We wouldn't". There's a long running joke in India to effect that the country does has GPS, but it doesn't stand for Global Positioning System, instead it stands for General Populace System. You look at an address, get to the nearest spot and then ask someone, repeating the process until you reach your destination.
Given how visual and landmark based Indian addresses are, this approach makes a lot of sense. In India I stayed at 3 different hotels in New Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. In Delhi, the address was Ring Road, New Delhi; in Mumbai it was Western Express Highway, Santacruz East and in Bangalore Swami Vivekananda Road, Off M.G. Road, Ulsoor. Standing outside each hotel and looking around, the addresses made a lot of sense, in Bangalore I was just off the M.G Road, named after Mahatma Gandhi; there's a lot of M.G. Roads in India, the equivalent of High Street in Britain. Other addresses include location clues such as near, opposite and by. If you really, really need to geocode an address you look it up on a digital map and make a note of the coordinates; a very manual and not at all scalable way of dealing with the problem.
Reading all of the above back to myself before I click on Publish makes me realise that in hindsight it's blindingly obvious that each country will have its own set of edge cases. India is no exception. A massive amount of credit for what I learned in India should go to Sajjad, Sumandro and Kaustubh, the team behind Bangalore's GeoBLR geo themed meetup. Thank you all, you taught me a massive amount and expanded my horizons considerably.
Tower of Silence (for Parsi Sky Burial): Mumbai by James Oleson on Flickr.
Running between Edgware, Mill Hill East and High Barnet to the North of London to Morden to the South, the London Underground's Northern Line stretches for 36 miles and takes in 50 stations. The line, marked in black on the Tube map, is a familiar sight to London commuters. But is the map of the line accurate? Does it reflect reality?
A geographic map of the line looks something like this. The Northern spurs of the line merge at Camden Town and then split into two branches, one via Charing Cross and the other via Bank, before merging again at Kennington and heading towards the Southern terminus at Morden.
But anyone who's travelled on the Northern Line will probably also be familiar with the line being colloquially referred to as The Misery Line. The line is old with the first stations opening in 1867; signal failures and delays are constant companions, despite TfL's program of upgrades and modernisation. Splitting the line into two sections, with Charing Cross trains terminating at Kennington and Bank trans running through to Morden doesn't seem to help much. Maybe it's time for a new map of the Northern Line that reflects the reality of commuting on this line? Maybe that map might look something like this?
Northern Line route map by Martin Deutsch. Northern Line map by Wikipedia. Realistic Northern Line map via Buzzfeed.
Up until the 6th. Century BC, it was commonly held that the world we live on was flat. Then Pythagorus came along and started to prove that the world is in fact a sphere. We now know that he was almost right and our planet is really an oblate spheroid, looking not dissimilar to a slightly squashed beach ball.
Today's Internet brings us many wonderful things. Some of those are maps. Today's map shows that with a little bit of cartographical cut-and-paste and a flagrant disregard for the theory of plate tectonics, the world we live on is actually a chicken. A giant chicken.
If this doesn't make you grateful for the Internet then I don't know what does.
This may be a personal foible but when I join a new company I mentally set myself two targets. The first is what I want to achieve with that company. The second is how long it will take to achieve this. If you reach the first target then the second is a moot point. But if the first target doesn't get reached and your self allocated timescale is close to coming to an end, then it's time to take stock.
Sometimes you can extend that timescale; when reaching your achievement target is so so close and you can be happy to stretch those timescales a little. Sometimes though this just doesn't work, not necessarily for any reason of your own making. Large companies are strange beasts and a strategic move which is right for the company may not align with your own targets and ideals.
In 2010, I left the Geo Technologies group at Yahoo! and departed from a very Californian large company to take up a new role with a very Finnish large company called Nokia. Though Nokia started life as the merger between a paper mill operation, a rubber company and a cable company in the mid 1800's, by the time I joined Nokia it was best known for mobile and smart phone handsets and the software that makes these ubiquitous black mirrors work.
In addition to mobile data connectivity, apps and GPS, one of the things that defines a smartphone is a maps app and the suite of back-end platforms that drive that app as well as all of the other APIs that enable today's smartphone location based services. Just as TomTom acquired digital map maker Tele Atlas in 2008, Nokia had acquired rival maps provider NAVTEQ in 2007, putting in place the foundations for Nokia's maps and turn-by-turn navigation products, part of the company's Ovi brand of internet services.
I spent the first 18 months of my time with Nokia commuting weekly from London to Berlin, where the company's maps division was based. The pros of this weekly commute of almost 600 miles each way was rapid progression through British Airway's frequent flyer program, getting to know the city of Berlin really well and developing deep and lasting friendships with my team, who were behind the Ovi Places Registry, but more about them in a moment. The cons were living out of hotels on a weekly basis and the strain it placed on my family back in London.
In 2011, Nokia pivoted its strategy as a result of new CEO Stephen Elop's infamous Burning Platform memo. The company's NAVTEQ division finally started to be integrated into Nokia, resulting in the rebranding of Ovi Maps to HERE Maps, by way of a brief spell as Nokia Maps and just before we were ready to ship the next major revision of the Places Registry, effectively powering all the data you see on a map which isn't part of the base map itself, the project was shelved in favour of NAVTEQ based places platform. This was probably the right thing to do from the perspective of the company, but it had a devastating effect on my Berlin based team who had laboured long and hard. The team was disbanded; some found new roles within the company, some didn't and were laid off and after spending several months tearing down what I'd spent so long helping to create, an agonising process in itself even though it was the right thing to do, I moved to help found the company crowd mapping group, driving the strategy behind the HERE Map Creator product. Think of a strategy not dissimilar to OpenStreetMap or Google Map Maker, only with a robust navigation grade map behind it.
All of which is merely a prelude to the fact that after almost 4 years with Nokia I've been taking stock and it's time to move on. The door marked Nokia, Ovi and HERE is now closed and it's time to look to the next adventure in what could loosely be termed my career. The metaphor of doors opening and closing seems fitting as Ovi just happens to be the Finnish word for door.
There's been a lot of high points over the past 4 or so years. Launching Nokia's maps and location platform at the final Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco. Negotiating the places section of Nokia's first strategic deal with Microsoft in a meeting room set against the amazing backdrop of Reykjavik in the depths of an Icelandic winter. Judging the World Bank's Sanitation Hackathon in Dar es Salaam.
But most of the high points have been people.
Someone who leads a team is only as good as the team and in the original Ovi Places Registry team and the subsequent Nokia Places team I found an amazing group of individuals, who made a roving Englishman feel very much at home in Berlin.
There's also been a lot of lows over the past 4 years, but I don't want to go into them here.
Instead, I want to close the door on the Nokia chapter with a brief mention to five people who made my time in Berlin so rich and rewarding. There's Aaron Rincover, HERE's UX lead, who taught me so much about the user experience in a relatively short period of time. There's also four members of the Places Registry team, Enda Farrell, Jennifer Allen, Mark MacMahon and Jilles Van Gurp, who made me welcome in a new city, who it was an absolute pleasure to work with and who will, I hope, remain close friends. Enda and Jennifer are still both at HERE as Senior Technical Architect and Product Manager and a damn fine ones at that. Mark and Jilles were amongst those who moved on when the Places team was disbanded and are now the founders of LocalStream. Thank you all of you.
So where next? My last two companies have been large multinational affairs, but to open 2014 I'm looking to keep things a lot smaller and more agile. I'm going to take some time to do some freelance consulting, still in the maps, location and geo space of course; this industry continues to grow and innovate at an astounding rate, why would I want to work anywhere else?
For the first quarter of 2014 I'm going to be joining London's Lokku, consulting for them as their Geotechnologist in Residence. Since 2006, Lokku have built up an impressive portfolio of geospatial and geotechnology assets under the lead of Ed Freyfogle and Javier Etxebeste, both alumni of Yahoo! like myself. Through the success of their Nestoria and Open Cage Data brands and the #geomob meetup, Lokku are in a great position to take their expertise in open geospatial data, OpenStreetMap data and open geospatial platforms to the next level. My role with Lokku will be to help them identify where that next level will be and what it will look like. It's going to be a refreshing change to move from the world of a large corporate, with staff ID badges and ID numbers to a world where everyone fits into the same, albeit large, room and where everyone literally knows everyone else. So say I'm excited by this challenge would be a massive understatement. If you want to know more about Lokku, check out their blog, Twitter feed or come and say hello.
As for the rest of 2014 and beyond, it's time to follow up on all those conversations that you tend to have about the next great thing in maps and location. Who knows precisely where 2014 will take me, but no matter where, it's going to be geotastic and I can't wait.
In his book A Zebra Is The Piano Of The Animal Kingdom, Jarod Kintz wrote "when you're a cartographer, having to make maps sort of comes with the territory". He's right. When your business is making maps you should be able to do just that. But what if you're not a cartographer? What if you had to draw a map of the country you live in? From memory? What would that map look like?
Maybe something like this perhaps? The shape of the United Kingdom and Ireland is vaguely right, though Cornwall and all of the Scottish islands bar the Shetlands seem to be lacking. Then again, the Isle Of Wight is on holiday off the North Coast of Wales. The Channel Islands have evicted the Isle Of Man, which is off sulking in the North Sea, probably annoying cross Channel ferries into the bargain. Also "Woo! Geography".
Or maybe your lovingly hand drawn map would look like this one, which is my personal favourite for no other reason than the helpful arrow in the North East corner pointing to Iceland (Not The Shop). Readers of this blog who don't live in the UK should know that in addition to being a Nordic island country that straddles the boundary between the North Atlantic and Artic Oceans, Iceland is also a chain of British stores that specialise in frozen food.
I'd like to think that I'd be able to do better than this final example from someone who has applied a significant amount of cartographical license and really, really needs someone to buy them an atlas. I'd like to think that. I might even try to do this myself, but in the interests of preserving what little reputation I have, I'd only post my attempt if it was any good.
Maps courtesy of BuzzFeed.
The Wikipedia entry for George William Frederick of Hanover, better known as King George III of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, is full of details but misses out one key aspect of his life. In addition to concurrently being King, Duke and prince-elect of Brunswick-Lüneburg he was also a map addict and avid map collector.
During the course of his reign between 1760 and 1801, George amassed a collection of around 60,000 maps and views, all of which were housed in a room in Buckingham House (which eventually became Buckingham Palace in 1837) which was right next to his bedroom.
Upon his death, the map collection was bequeathed to the nation and now resides in the British Library and last night a lucky group of people, Alison and myself included, were given a rare chance to get to grips with some of the collection that focused on London. I use the phrase get to grips in the most literal sense. This was no viewing of maps in frames or behind glass. The maps were spread over the table of the library's boardroom and we were encouraged to get really close and do what we so often want to do with an old map but aren't usually allowed to. We got to touch them. We were even allowed to take photos too.
But how did George manage to amass such a prolific collection in 40 odd years? The collection started as the everyday working map library of previous British monarchs, dating back to 1660 and including maps from the times of Charles II, James II and Anne. With this smaller collection as a starting point, George continued his childhood fascination with maps and grew the collection by almost any means possible. When you're a King almost anything and any means are possible.
Some maps were formally commissioned by George, or were presented to him as gifts as a sort of cartographic backhander. Some came into the collection during times of war or conflict, particularly some of the military maps in the collection. Some were stolen outright from foreign sources, whilst some came from much closer to home, from his own subjects.
There are stories that George would make random and unannounced visits to people who just so happened to have fine maps on their walls. If George expressed a liking for a map, this was supposed to be a signal that the map's owner, might, just possibly, want to consider giving the map to the King, as a gift you understand. Most people who were the beneficiaries of one of the King's unannounced visits took the hint and the collection grew steadily. But people also got wise to having their houses gatecrashed by their monarch and learned to keep their good maps hidden away. Just in case the next knock on the door turned out to be the King.
At the British Library, George's map collection is formally known as King George III's Topographical Collection, often shorted to the informal KTop. Of the 60,000 maps in KTop over 1,000 are of London. Work has been started on cataloging and ultimately digitising at high resolution all of the London maps. We will all get to benefit from this as the images will be made available for all to come and see on the British Library's website. This is no trivial endeavour. To catalogue and digitise just the 1,000 London maps in the collection will cost £100,000, of which £10,000 is hoped to be raised through public donations. Yet this is just the start. The final goal is to do the same with the remaining 59,000 maps in the collection.
But until then, the collection remains safely stored somewhere in the depths of the library's buildings on London's Euston Road. I count myself very very lucky indeed to not only have seen some of the KTop with my own eyes but to have been able to reach out and touch a part of cartographic history.
About 2 years ago I wrote about something I called mapping the might have been; things that were planned and made it onto a map but which never came about. Now it's time for the opposite; maps of things that haven't yet come to be but which probably will. It's less mapping the might have been and more mapping the will be.
The planet we live on is one giant magnet, with poles that roughly align with the geographic poles which marks the axis on which the Earth spins. We're used to the notion that North is up at the top of the planet and South is on the other side. But what if these poles reverse? About every half a million years or so this happens and when it does, everything changes and magnetic compasses will no longer work the way we expect them to. When this does happen, maybe the map of the world that we're so familiar with will look something like this.
From examining the magnetic patterns in rock, scientists have calculated that the process of geomagnetic reversal has happened more times than you'd think, almost 20 times in the course of our planet's history and they estimate this will happen again. But probably not for another 2000 or so years so you won't need this map just yet.
On a shorter timescale, you might need these next maps a bit sooner. You don't need to be a scientist to know that our planet is slowly but surely warming and the polar ice caps aren't as big as they were. But what would the map of the world look like if all the polar ice melted? In Europe a lot of familiar cities would go the way of Atlantis; London, Venice, Amsterdam and Copenhagen would all vanish slowly under the rising seas.
While on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, most of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, including Boston, New York, Washington, D.C, Miami and New Orleans would also be no more.
Whatever your views on the topic of climate change, these National Geographic maps are a sobering and grimly fascinating view of what might and probably will be.
Map credits: Amazing Maps and National Geographic
Today's digital maps, both on the web, on our mobile phones and in our cars are almost ubiquitous. But they're not without their problems. They need recharging, updating and most need some form of network connectivity and that's even before you look at the potential privacy aspects of who's watching your position. But now there's the next generation of portable navigation system.
This unprecedented technological revolution works without cables, without electronics, without a network connection and is both compact and portable. Integrated into a flexible cellulose based pad, it expands from the size of your pocket to as much as 48" via the patented FUF technology (folding and unfolding).
Panning, zooming and rotation can be performed without image degradation; it's fast, working smoothly within picoseconds. It also respects a user's privacy, it's impossible to hack and there's no need for any antivirus or firewall.
It's unbreakable, private and portable and goes by the name of MAP. Trust me, you'll all be using one sooner or later.
We've become firmly accustomed to the instant gratification of Internet Time, which can be roughly summarised as "I want it now, dammit". Nowhere is this more evident than in maps. If something is wrong on a map, we expect it to be fixed. Now. Ten or so years ago, it would be common to wait somewhere between 12 and 18 months for a map's updates to be collected, validated and published. These days, thanks to our modern digital maps, we get our updates in more or less Internet Time and that means fast. It hasn't always been that way.
Although waiting over a year for a map update seems almost unthinkable now, consider for a moment having to wait almost half a century for a map to be updated. Yet this is what happened in the curious cartographical case of the Island of California.
I should state up front that I've been to California, quite a few times. The weather is fine (apart from San Francisco's fog), it's home to the technical hub of Silicon Valley and the local food and wine are rather good. It is most definitely not an island and what's more, there's a distinct lack of tribes of beautiful Amazonian warriors wielding gold tools and weaponry. Yet in 1510, Spanish author Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo published a novel entitled Las Sergas de Esplandián, or The Adventures Of Esplandián, which mentions the Island of California, populated by the aforementioned female warriors. The name and concept of an island stuck and early Spanish explorers of what we now call Baja California were convinced the new territory they had found was part of the Island of California.
In retrospect, early maps of the New World actually got the geography of California right. Both Mercator, he of web map projection controversy, in 1538 and Ortelius, in 1570, made maps that correctly showed California as a peninsula.
But that all changed in 1602.
A merchant, Sebastián Vizcaíno, was appointed by the Viceroy of New Spain to examine the coastal regions and make new maps. On board one of Vizcaíno's expeditions was one Antonia de la Ascensión who wrote ...
that the whole Kingdom of California discovered on this voyage, is the largest island known…and that it is separated from the provinces of New Mexico by the Mediterranean Sea of California.
This geographic blunder was further reinforced by Antonia Vázquez de Espinosa, who wrote in 1615 that ...
California is an island, and not continental, as it is represented on the maps made by the cosmographers.
The notion of California as an island was thus firmly cemented in the minds of the day's cartographers, featuring in the first general atlas of the world that was published in England between 1626 and 1627. Even European cartographers finally gave up in their portrayal of California as a peninsula and by 1650 all maps of note showed the Island.
And so it remained until 1705 when a Jesuit missionary, Father Eusebio Kino, made a report of his journeys, with an accompanying map, that showed that California really was attached to the rest of the North American continent. Even then, it took until 1746 when another Jesuit, Fernando Consag, tried and failed to sail around the non-existant island, to put an end to the Island of California.
Despite this, it took a further 50 or so years before maps showed California as we now know it to be, part of North America and not, as de Montalvo wrote, being close to the Asian mainland and also "very close to the side of the Terrestrial Paradise".
Next time you get annoyed and frustrated by a modern map not being entirely up to date, you can rest assured that it'll probably take a month or two at the most to be updated and not a half century. In the meantime, the Island of California remains an enduring oddity in the history books of exploration and cartography and one which is showcased on Stanford University's web site as part of the Glen McLaughlin collection.
Image credits: Stanford University Library and the Glen McLaughlin Collection
Despite having a lot of NSFW content, estimated at between 2% to 4% by the site's founder, Tumblr is also the microblogging site that some maps and cartography aficionados call home. The scope and range of these is simply staggering. But now there's a new, albeit tenuously, related maps Tumblr in town.
For general maps enthusiasm, there's Fuck Yes Maps!, run by a boy and two girls who blog about maps because they're awesome. No disagreement from me on that point.
Slightly more cartographically centred but similarly named is Fuck Yeah Cartography! that sets out to explore interesting representations of space. Apparently. There's also Fuck Yeah Maps, not to be confused with the Yes variant mentioned earlier.
If maps and globals are more your thing, the aptly named Maps and Globes might appeal, which is curated by Emily who's addicted to planar surfaces.
Tumblr also seems to be populated by blogs about people ... doing ... stuff. Think Stormtroopers Doing Things if you will. So it's probably a logical extension to this that there's now Men Pointing At Maps. No, really.
All of which is good for showing just how many carto-nerds and map-geeks there are out there on today's Interwebs. But it does beg a question. Where are the women pointing at maps? Surely maps and pointing aren't a purely patriachal occupation. Someone should start a rival about women pointing at maps. Someone probably will ...
Despite Transport for London owning the copyright (and enforcing it) on Harry Beck's iconic map of the London Underground network, people just won't stop creating variants of the map. I may have written about these once, twice, three or even more times. But now, there's a reworking of the Tube map to possibly end all Tube maps reworks.
At first sight, surely it's yet another Tube map rework? Quirky and amusing line names in the right colours? Check. Station names that aren't the current station names? Check. Faithfully reproducing the line layout? Check.
But then you dig deeper and discover that this isn't just another Tube map rework, it's a Tube map of Tube map reworks. Each station is assigned one of the other Tube map reworks that today's Interwebs seem to be full of. Each line tries to categorise the Tube map reworks into some, albeit subjective, categorisation.
Thus Maxwell Robert's curvy Tube map rework sits on a station in Edgware's place called Curvy and on a line called Reworked, while the early pre-Beck era map sits where Ealing Broadway should be and at the interchange of the Metaphor and Official lines.
This is verging dangerously close to genius in my book and Esri's Ken Field deserves some form of award for taking the time and effort to put this together. My one minor and extremely subjective niggle is that the explanatory text in the sidebar says click the stations to go to further details. My first exploratory foray into this map, clicking on the station names, yielded multiple popup dialog boxes saying No information available. Luckily Barry Rowlingson helpfully pointed out that what I should have been clicking on was the station interchange circles and the little offset lugs from each line and not the name itself.
Will this be the last word in Tube map pastiches? Probably not. Does it take a certain sort of mad cartographical endeavour to bring this all together? Probably. Has it wasted far too much of my time digging into the Tube maps I already know and showing me ones I didn't? Maybe. Have I had masses of almost educational fun playing with this map? Absolutely.
You're a fully fledged map geek and cartography nerd. Your house is plastered with maps. You even have your map room as a place on Foursquare. What could you possibly add to your household?
The answer, spotted by Tim Waters, is naturally, map furniture.
Where better to sit in comfort with a glass of your favourite tipple and plot your next mapping endeavour?
Naturally, I want one.
If there's one thing that stands out more than a map that says "you are here", it's a map that says "you are here" and seems to get the map wrong.
It has to be said, short haul European flights are a bit on the boring side. Once you've read the day's newspaper, had a drink and a snack and read a few chapters of a book there's not much else to do. Most airlines that hop between European destinations don't have inflight wifi yet and there's no inflight entertainment to be had, except to watch your progress towards your destination on the map that appears on the screen over your head.
So it was with this map, which was snapped on a flight a few days ago from Rome's Fiumicino airport to London's Heathrow was coming to a close. But there's something wrong with this map.
London has three major airports, of which Heathrow is the only one that's anywhere near Central London. The other two, Gatwick and Stansted, are out in the so called Home Counties, in Sussex and in Essex respectively. But that's not what the inflight map seems to show. Or does it? The map seems to show that we were flying directly over Stansted but that somehow London's third airport had mysteriously been moved from the north east of London to south of the River Thames, somewhere south of Gravesend.
My gut reaction was that the inflight map was just wrong. But the clue to this in all in the name Stansted (and not Stanstead as it's commonly misspelt). There is indeed a Stansted (a small village notable for a lack of airport) in Kent as well as a Stansted (and an airport) in Essex.
All of which makes me wonder just what the map's cartographers were thinking when they thought to put the village of Stansted, with a population of around 200, on an inflight map and with seemingly equal billing with some of the UK's major cities and manage to confuse it with a major UK airport. This isn't a recent map slip up either, as Wikipedia reports that this has been in place since 2007.
In early 2007, British Airways mistakenly used inflight 'skymaps' that relocated Stanstead Airport, Essex to Stansted in Kent. Skymaps show passengers their location, but the mistake was luckily not replicated on the pilots' navigation system. BA blamed outside contractors hired to make the map. "It was the mistake of the independent company that produced the software," said a spokeswoman. "The cartographer appears to have confused the vast Essex airport, which handles 25 million passengers a year, with this tiny Kent village, also called Stansted, which has a population of around 200".
Time for a refresh of British Airway's inflight maps I think.
Crowd sourcing data is a laudable approach. Crowd sourcing data and putting it one a map seems like a good idea. Crowd sourcing data and putting it on a map without any verification or checks? You might not end up with what you originally intended.
This is a lesson that Benadryl, the hay fever medication, has sadly learned the hard way. At first sight it seems innocuous enough; a hay fever relief brand teams up with the UK's Met Office to crowd source areas where there's a high pollen count.
You take that crowd sourced information and put it on a map so fellow hay fever sufferers know what to expect in their neighbourhood and with the presumed side effect that if you are a hay fever sufferer then maybe you might want to pop out and buy some Benadryl to help cope with the symptoms.
But people are ... creative and whilst you might get an accurate map of high pollen count areas you might also find that people want to be ... well let's just call it artistic.
First of all a series of map markers across Westminster, on the bank of London's River Thames seemed to spell out a word that rhymes with duck. Note that for those of you with a sensitive disposition or who are reading this at work, the screen shots below have been pixellated out for your comfort and convenience; you can click through for the NSFW versions if you so choose.
This was followed in quick succession by another word, this time rhyming with bit, appearing across London's Docklands area.
Who knows how far the creative hay fever sufferers of the United Kingdom would have taken this but it wasn't to last. Benadryl noticed this new form of map art and quickly took the social pollen count site down and it has since reappeared, though this time there seems to be some checks in place so that users can report high pollen count areas and only high pollen count areas. But whilst their developers were frantically trying to put some safeguards in place, it has to be said that Benadryl put up a temporary replacement that shows a certain sense of style and a whole lot of class.
Screen shot credits: Us vs. Them.
If you live in a city for any period of time, you form a mental image of what quantifies certain areas or neighbourhoods. If someone mentions, say, posh London, I instantly think of the area around Mayfair and Knightsbridge. But you could put this personal and biased view on a map?
It turns out Yelp has done just that, producing a heat map of my home city of all the reviews that mention posh. It looks pretty much as I'd imagine.
The same applies for the term hipster. I'd immediately associate the area around Hoxton and Old Street (AKA Silicon Roundabout) with all things hipsterish. As it turns out, so do Yelp's reviewers.
All of which is oddly comforting. Maybe my mental map of a city isn't so personal and subjective after all.
A tip of the hat is due to Chris Osborne for pointing out these mapping gems.
Some uses of maps have remained relatively unchanged through the ages. We still use them to find out where we are and how to get somewhere else. Governments still use them to say "this is mine, that is yours". But as our planet has now been pretty comprehensively mapped, we don't use them to say "I got here first" that much anymore.
Which makes maps that prove that someone really did get there first extremely coveted and extremely valuable in about equal measures. The combination of value, national pride and good old human greed also makes early maps a fertile breeding ground for trickery and fakery.
The discovery of the fourth continent, after Europe, Asia and Africa, seems to have had more than its fair share of controversy.
Popular opinion holds that Cristoforo Columbo, better known as the anglicised Christopher Columbus, got to America first in 1492. Of course first is a loaded term; Columbus may have been the first European to set foot in the Americas but he certainly wasn't the first human on the continent. But did Columbus get there first?
Probably not; there's now growing evidence that a Norse expedition, led by Leif Ericson, landed on what is now Newfoundland in the 11th Century after being blown off course by a storm when travelling from Norway to Greenland. According to the Book of Icelanders, compiled around 1122 by Ari The Wise, Ericson first landed on a rocky and desolute place he named Helluland or Flat Rock Land, which may have been Baffin Island and then sailed for a further two days before landing again in a place he named Vinland, often mistranslated literally as Wineland but more likely to mean Land with Great Grass Fields.
Of course it would help if there was a map of Vinland, to underscore the I got there first point.
Luckily in 1957 a map of Vinland came to light, as part of short medieval text called the Hystoria Tartaorum (The Tartar Relation). The Vinland map seemed to be dated from the 15th Century and in true mappa mundi tradition showed the world as it was known then, with Africa, Asia, Europe as well as a landmass labelled Vinland to the South West of Greenland. Coincidentally, three years after the Vinland map emerged, an archeological dig uncovered a Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. Surely this proved the authenticity of the Vinland map?
In the years since, the Vinland map has attracted controversy with as many people believing its authenticity as those who thought it a fake.
Enter John Paul Floyd, a Glaswegian researcher who seems to have proved that the parchment the Vinland map is drawn on is a genuine 15th Century relic. That's the parchment, not the map though. Floyd has discovered that the Hystoria Tartaorum was displayed at an event in 1892 and again in 1926 and on both occasions the document was conspicuously map free. Add to this the fact that the Vinland map uses textual idioms more consistent with the 17th Century than 200 years ealier and that the map includes characteristics found in 18th Century reproductions of a 1463 world map and all the evidence is pointing to the Vinland map being a fake created sometime between the 1920s and the 1950s.
Leif Ericson may have been the first European to visit and colonise the Americas, but there still seems to be no map known that says he did it first.
If you're one of the people who have a Times and Sunday Times paywall account, there's more coverage on the Sunday Times website; for the remaining 99.999% of the population, there's additional coverage over at BoingBoing.
Photo Credits: Wikipedia.
There's a new version of Google Maps for the web but so far it's not for everyone. You need to request an invite and not everyone gets one of those it seems. But if you're impatient or curious and don't mind a tiny amount of technical hackery you can get to test drive the new version without the need to be one of those blessed with a preview invite.
If you go to Google Maps right now, you'll still see the current incarnation of Google's map. This is what the map of my home town looks like. The new preview version is there, you just can't see it.
The key to unlocking the new preview is held in a cookie called NID. If you change the cookie's value from one impenetrable string of characters to another, equally impenetrable string of characters, the preview will automagically get unlocked. There's several ways to modify a cookie; as I use Chrome on a daily basis I used the Edit This Cookie extension, but there's other ways to do this depending on your browser of choice. Once you've found the NID cookie, change its value to ...
67=MzRdy0T16I7lw9REhtIF5N5lkuoSy1s7cJGFa24wZ6pRK0kRpU9SqiTWy9r_DQ4UxdmHjSeMImvsqgrVUbC0T9FhuESvl__dlkZwRBTxkzxWcdq8vDcpuvnuve6yI78LeqFFK21yc0_6Bp3cHS4Z3a6nwwBQm_fW8DfHF7lv6OrkDosmMa-GaDOLVXR2ewK5-xAk
... and reload the page. Hey presto. Welcome to the new Google Maps.
One final word of warning; this is a hack. It's likely to change or go away at any time. If you're a Chrome user, it also seems to wreak havoc with Chrome's omnibox searches as well. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.
The boundaries of Europe's constituent countries have changed a lot in my lifetime. Some countries don't exist anymore whilst others have come into existence. But it takes a map visualisation to make you realise just how much the map of Europe has changed.
Actually, it takes two map visualisations. The first, courtesy of the BBC, dates from 2005 and covers the years between 1900 and 1994. Starting wit Imperial Europe and fast forwarding though two world wars, plus the Cold War and taking in the collapse of the Communist Bloc and the expansion of the European Union.
The other map takes a much wider view, ranging from 1000 AD to the present day. It's oddly fascinating to watch the Holy Roman and Byzantine Empires go from dominance to vanishing entirely.
But the purist in me finds as much to dislike as to like in both of these maps. The BBC one is just two small and cries out for the ability to pan and zoom the map. For some unexplained reason, the map is ... tiny and, though I hesitate to use the word in this content, the cartographer has obviously been experimenting with differing shades of colour to try and clearly delineate the countries but didn't experiment hard enough.
The LiveLeak map is also small and while the video containing the map can be enlarged to full screen, there's a loss of crispness to the map. For a map with such a wide timespan, it would have helped massively to have some kind of timeline accompanying the animation, so you can see just where in history you are.
Two maps. Both interesting. Both, for me, ultimately flawed. This sort of map just cries out to be reworked. If only I could find a suitable boundary data set spanning over a thousand years.
March the 5th 2013 marked the 501st birthday of Gerardus Mercator, whose map projection appears on virtually every web map you'll find on the interwebs today. It appears he's none too happy about the lack of royalties on this and so I felt compelled to use a projection for my next map which wasn't Mercator's.
I've been using a lot of Natural Earth's vector data to make maps recently and so Tom Patterson's rather beautiful Natural Earth projection seemed fitting and avoided the wrath of Gerardus into the bargain.
Continuing my dabblings in Mike Bostock's D3, reworking the Countries That Do And Don't Cry For Me map that did the rounds on the internet some years back took up a couple of spare hours last night; making maps is addictive it seems.
The full map is here, hosted on maps.geotastic.org ... and for those who don't get the cultural reference, this song from a certain 1970's musical might help.
Last night I made another map. It tries to answer some of more perplexing and confusing facets of the geography surrounding the world's 9th largest island. I mean of course Great Britain. No, wait. I mean the United Kingdom. No, wait. I mean Britain. Or do I mean England? See, it's confusing.
This isn't the first time I've covered this topic. The first time was for a post on the now defunct Yahoo! Geo Technologies blog entitled UK Addressing, The Non Golden Rules Of Geo Or Help! My Country Doesn't Exist. The ygeoblog.com domain is now long gone and redirects to the Yahoo! corporate blog but I was able to reproduce this post here and it's also captured in the Internet Archive's WayBackMachine. The second time was when I made a variation of The Great British Venn Diagram. But this is the first time (though probably not the last) that I've used a map, which is odd as this is something that's tailor-made for a map.
I'd been looking for a good source of geographic vector data that I could use to easily overlay polygons on a map and came across a rich source of free vector and raster map data from Natural Earth. But instead of overlaying that data on top of a standard slippy map using a JavaScript maps API to tap into a tile server's bitmap tiles, I soon wondered whether I could actually make a map from the vector data. It turned out I could and decided to revisit the structure of the group of islands I live on one more time and try to visualise the difference between Great Britain, the United Kingdom and the British Isles. The end result, punningly entitled the Great British Map, looks something like this ...
When the page first loads you'll see the coastlines of Britain, Ireland and towards the bottom, the Channel Islands. There's then five ways of looking at this particular map.
There's the group of geographic islands that's termed the British Isles; these show up in purplish-grey and if you're observant, the Channel Islands vanish as they're not part of this island group.
Then there's the individual geographic islands of Great Britain, Ireland, the Isle Of Man and The Channel Islands; these show up in green.
There's two sovereign states, The United Kingdom of Great Britain And Northern Island and the Republic Of Ireland; these show up in red.
Next comes the administrative countries which make up the United Kingdom; England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. These show up in yellow.
Finally, there's the Crown Dependencies, the self governing possessions of the British Crown; the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands are these and they show up as purple.
What's missing from the map? The British Overseas Territories, which is a polite way of saying what's left of the British Empire that didn't gain independence and which the United Kingdom still asserts sovereignty over. These are Anguilla, Bermuda, British Antarctic Territory, British Indian Ocean Territory, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat, Pitcairn Islands, St. Helena, Ascension Island, Tristan da Cunha, the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekalia and the Turks and Caicos Islands.
If you're interested in how I actually made the map, read on.
The source data from the map are two public domain datasets from Natural Earth; the 1:10m map Admin 0 Subunits dataset and the 1:10m Populated Places dataset. This data includes shapefiles which can be converted into GeoJSON format by the GDAL ogr2ogr command line tool. I extracted the vectors for the UK, Ireland, Isle of Man and Channel Islands from the Admin 0 Subunits dataset, keying on their ISO 3166-1 Alpha-3 country codes.
$ ogr2ogr -f GeoJSON -where "adm0\_a3 IN ('GBR','IRL','IMN','GGY','JEY','GBA')" subunits.json ne\_10m\_admin\_0\_map\_subunits/ne\_10m\_admin\_0\_map\_subunits.shp
I then extracted the place data from the Populated Places dataset, again extracting data for the UK, Ireland, Isle of Man and Channel Islands, this time keying on their ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 country codes. Not entirely sure why one dataset uses Alpha-2 and the other uses Alpha-3 but go figure; the data is free, accurate and open so who am I to complain?
$ ogr2ogr -f GeoJSON -where "iso\_a2 IN ('GB','IM','JE','GG') AND SCALERANK < 8" places.json ne\_10m\_populated\_places/ne\_10m\_populated\_places.shp
Finally, I merged subunits.json and places.json into a single TopoJSON file, with the added bonus that TopoJSON is much much smaller than GeoJSON. The source GeoJSON weighed in at 549 KB whereas the combined TopoJSON is a mere 78 KB.
$ topojson --id-property su\_a3 -p NAME=name -p name -o great-british-map.json subunits.json places.json
The main reason for use of TopoJSON is not that it's much more lightweight than GeoJSON, but that Mike Bostock's excellent D3 JavaScript library can easily slurp in TopoJSON and inject SVG straight into an HTML document. Which is precisely what the map's underlying code does. There's a lot more that D3 could do with this map, but it's early days and for a first step into a new maps library, I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out.
Speaking of code, it should come as no surprise that the map's code base is available on GitHub. The Great British Map is based on great D3 tutorial that Mike has written on vector mapping using Natural Earth, so the similarity between Mike's map and my map is entirely intentional.
A lot of great conferences in the UK happen in London. But not all great conferences. For some, you have to travel a little further afield. Maybe to East Anglia. Or more specifically to Norwich, the county town of Norfolk. If you were in Norwich last week, you might have noticed that SyncConf was taking place and I'd been asked by ex-MultiMapper and co-founder of SyncConf, John Fagan to do a talk on something related to maps. How could I refuse?
SyncConf isn't a maps conference or a geo conference; it's a tech conference for the city's tech and startup community. So it seemed to make sense not to go full-on maps nerd for the conference audience but instead look at how we got to the current state of play where the digital map has become ubiquitous. It also allowed me to the opportunity to put a little bit of map porn into a slide deck.
This is how it turned out .. my slide deck and notes follow after the break.
Image Credits: Denise Bradley, Eastern Daily Press.
So, hello, I’m Gary and I'm from the internet. I’m a self-confessed map addict, a geo- technologist and a geographer. I’m Director of Global Community Programs for HERE, Nokia’s maps group. Prior to Nokia I led Yahoo’s Geotechnologies group in the United Kingdom. I’m a founder of the Location Forum, a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, I sit on the Council and Executive for the AGI, the UK’s Association for Geographic Information, I’m the chair of the W3G conference, a committer to the Mapstraction open source maps API and I’m also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
This is the abridged version of this talk; the original is a whole lot bigger but I’ve been warned that there’s a speed limit for slides in this county so I’ve had to pare the talk down and I’ll try hard not to exceed the slides-per-minute rate.
There are URLs in this talk but this is the only URL in the entirety of this talk you might want to take a note of. Although if you go there right now, it'll 404 on you, later today or tomorrow, this is where this slide deck, my notes and all the links you'll be seeing will appear on my blog. That’s an upper case “I” and an upper case “S” at the end of the URL by the way ...
Before I go any further I need to thank this man, Steven Feldman. There’s a lot of maps history in this talk and while it’s easy to get hold of snapshots of how the web looks right now, it’s less easy to get hold of snapshots about how the web used to look. So I’m thoroughly indebted to Steven for allowing me to rummage through his collection of digital maps history.
As the name of this talk probably suggests, there’s a lot of maps in the slide to come. Some people have called previous talks I’ve done map porn. This is true and I make no apology for it.
As the name of this talk probably suggests, there’s a lot of maps in the slide to come. Some people have called previous talks I’ve done map porn. This is true and I make no apology for it.
This isn’t the earliest map but it’s one of the earliest that’s recognisable as a map; it’s of the world as the Babylonians thought of it. Babylon is in the centre of the map and there's seven triangular islands, 3 of which are missing due to damage, in the "river of bitter water", or the sea. To me, the Babylon map is both art, hope and inspiration for the unmapped areas of their world and the best attempt of the age to be authoritative.
Fast forward several centuries to the "golden age of exploration" and while maps are more recognisably accurate, they're also art. But this art came at a price. You needed to be wealthy to commission such a map and such a map was often given as a notional gift to the rich and powerful to curry favour.
Furthermore maps were state secrets; sharing maps was sharing power and influence. The entrepreneurs of the time were the great navigators like Columbus and Magellan, their sponsors were kings and countries; their business plan were maps.
But maps don't just have to be geographically accurate. They can show data as well. This 1869 map by Charles Minard shows the losses suffered by Napoleon's army in his 1812 Russian campaign. Beginning at the Polish/Russian border on the led, the thick pinkish band shows the size of the army as they advanced towards Moscow. The thinner black band shows the ever decreasing size of the remains of the army as they retreated in the bitterly cold winter.
Another type of not necessarily geographically accurate map are the familiar mass transit and metro maps that you probably all recognise, all descended in some shape or form from Harry Beck's iconic map of London's Tube system.
So we have maps trying to tell the story of the world. Maps as art. Maps as power. Maps to get you around a city by train. But if you wanted to get around on foot or by car, up until just over 10 years ago, if you lived in a major metropolitan area you probably went around with a city street atlas, such as this one from London, with you.
I lugged one of these around for the best part of two decades, getting ever more battered and worn and filled with hand written navigation notes on how to get from A to B.
Then rather than carry around a local street atlas, people started instead to carry round a laser printed copy of the web map for where they wanted to go. Its this digital web map that I want to talk about
So fast forward to the early days of the internet, before the World Wide Web was formed, before people started to recognise URLs and web site addresses, before smartphones and tablets ...
Just like people questioned why you’d want to put a camera in a mobile phone, the early days of digital maps were met with incredulity by traditional map makers. Why on earth would you put a map onto a computer when you could carry a printed map out into the street with you. And while we take modern digital maps pretty much for granted, on our laptop and desktop, on our smartphone and on our tablets, they’ve actually been around a lot longer than most people realise ...
The story of the digital map starts over 30 years ago in the mid to late 1980’s. In 1984 a company called TeleAtlas formed in the Netherlands and the following year another company called Navtech formed in Silicon Valley. Both made rudimentary digital map data and TeleAtlas’s data would form part of ETAK, the first in-car navigation system.
In 1989 the rollout of the US controlled Global Positioning System starts. These days we know this as GPS.
Then, in 1991, at Cern in Switzerland a man called Tim Berners-Lee started to link a web of documents together and on this very NeXT cube (formed by Steve Jobs after he’d been ousted from Apple), the first webserver and web site was born and the World Wide Web officially started.
Mid 1993 and the final of the first set of GPS satellites were launched and the same month the first web server that served up maps went online; the Xerox PARC Map Viewer. These were static maps with none of the clicking, tapping, dragging, panning and zooming that we associate with online maps today.
In 1995, MultiMap launched. This is important. We tend to think of digital maps as being a purely Silicon Valley product thanks to Yahoo, Google and the like. But MultiMap was a pioneer and more importantly, it was a British pioneer.
MapBlast! was a web mapping service launched in the mid-1990s by Vicinity Corporation. It allowed website owners to incorporate maps in their own web pages, and was later syndicated across most major Web, wireless, handheld and interactive TV platforms including Yahoo!, Excite, Lycos, ATT Interactive and Palm, among others. By 2000, MapBlast was the #2 mapping site on the Web
In 1996, MapQuest started; a subsidiary of R. O’Donelly that produced maps for the Blue Pages, the local information section at the front of US phone directories. MapQuest launched the first commercial web maps application. You could now put maps and other map related content on web sites. The maps came from Navteq and other sources, including MapQuest’s own. The Automobile Association of America were an early customer with a very primitive form of turn-by-turn navigation; you called the AAA, told them your route and they printed a map for your journey.
So we now have early digital maps. But they were small maps. Converting map vector data to raster images took time, the bigger the image the more time it took. Bandwidth over dial up modems also meant that putting a map in a browser was slow. So digital maps were small; they were quicker to produce and they downloaded quicker. They were also ugly maps; a stock cartography style and, in the UK, the dominance of OS map data didn’t make the maps appealing to the eye. Browsers were primitive compared with today and map functionality was very limited; no panning or zooming here. Even MultiMap used this way of producing digital maps though they did a much better job of it than most.
In 1997, MapXsite launched; the first dedicated web maps app for locating local stores and businesses, paving the way in the future for 100’s of Starbucks coffee store locator apps.
By February 1999, MapQuest had served up 76.2M maps and was the number 5 travel/tourism site on the web according to Media Metrix Inc. May 1999 and MapQuest goes public and raises $69M USD into the bargain. In July Microsoft sells its SideWalk property to TicketMaster and gets out of web mapping, starting the company’s on, off, on again affair with maps.
December 1999 and AOL buys MapQuest for $1.1Bn. That’s a £1,031M increase in less than 12 months. This is the start of the dot-com boom madness. Bear in mind that MapQuest were largely making money on B2B deals; their consumer web site was loosing money fast.
February 2000 and Vicinity goes public, raising $120M and peaking at a market cap of $2BN before dropping by 25%. Vicinity were trading as 160 times their revenue and losing over $1M a month at the time.
Up until 2000 there was two sorts of GPS signal – a degraded civilian one and and an accurate military one. This difference stopped in May 2000. As a result GPS starts to become widespread in civilian devices, leading to the explosion of personal satnav devices and the presence of GPS in our smartphones
This isn’t really web maps but it’s interesting as a taste of things to come. MultiMap launches a WAP service using TeleAtlas street level maps with travel directions, aerial imagery and London Underground maps. Suddenly everyone’s talking about mobile but due to a lack of mobile data bandwidth, a lack of applications and a lack of battery life, mobile won’t take off for another 7 or 8 years.
By March 2000, dot com madness is in full swing. The value of map data was completely distorted by the licensors; compare and contrast with the ridiculous prices paid for 3G licenses in the UK. Most of the original maps start-ups will go out of business as a result of the dot com boom turning into the dot bomb crash.
April 2002 and Microsoft is back in the mapping game with MapPoint.
October 2002 and Microsoft buys Vicinity, which already had $80M in the bank from its IPO for $96M. A great deal for Microsoft, or pouring money down the drain?
By 2003 MultiMap had served up over 1Bn maps!
Not many people realise that Yahoo were the first people to launch slippy maps, where you can click and drag to pan and zoom the map, and integration with search. One of the original engineers behind Vicinity jumped ship to help Yahoo! launch their maps; I worked with him whilst I was at Yahoo! and he’s still there.
By 2004 things are changing and starting to morph into what we now recognise as today’s web map landscape and players. Google launches Local, searching local business listings and displaying the results on a map. Sounds familiar? It’s worth noting that in 2003-2005 Google used MapQuest for their maps.
Towards the end of 2004 and maps are the most popular online activity according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project survey. Email and online chat was number 2.
The same month, a man called Steve Coast presented ideas for a publicly editable map of the world ... OpenStreetMap ... at EuroFOO after being inspired by the success of Wikipedia and a growing frustration with the license around proprietary data in general, but in the UK in particular.
October 2004. Google acquires Where 2 technologies, getting a tile server that was capable of serving up map tiles to a desktop client, with early use of AJAX. At the same time, the cost of data storage falls to < $0.50 a GB (today’s prices are closer to $0.07 a GB) ... suddenly storing all of that map data becomes cheaper and easier.
The same month, Google also acquires Keyhole and 9 months later Google Earth launches.
Despite being phenomenally popular, web maps were limited by complexity, cost and lack of interaction. Developing a web map app was complex, needing expensive maps and knowledge of how to manipulate geographic and spatial data sets. Surely there was an easier way to use maps on the web? Then, in 2005, there was.
February 2005 and Google Maps launches; apparently maps can be fun and useful. Firstly in the US, then in Japan, Canada and the UK.
2 months later and the first maps mashup emerges; a ride sharing app, built internally at Google using an undocumented API.
This undocumented API didn’t remain private for long and by June people were discovering it and producing their own mashups, such as Housing Maps and the Chicago Crime Map.
Google’s technology is being used in a way they didn’t foresee. Google are paying licensing fees for maps data and the unofficial mashups are getting this for free. What should Google do? Slam the door in the faces of this new and rapidly developing way of using maps?
Instead, John Hanke (ex of Keyhole) formally released the Google Maps API. It made sense. Google needed the internet to grow; more web content to index; more space to place ads on; more brand recognition. What would this free maps API do to the other businesses in this sector? I don’t think they took it too seriously ... at least to start with.
Google’s Maps API was followed in quick succession by similar offerings from Yahoo! and from Microsoft.
And as maps APIs explode across the web, the Open Source communities start to take notice too.
In 2005, O’Reilly publish Web Mapping Illustrated and the first Where 2.0 conference soon follows. 20% of web users are now using online maps.
In May 2006 a group of OSM mappers took a trip to the Isle of Wight. This is what the OSM map looked like when they arrived. And this is what it looked like 2 days later; completely mapped.
June 2006 and the Enterprise and Google start to court each other and 24% of web users worldwide are using web maps; that figure increases to 45% in the UK and 40% in the US
By 2006, web mapping and location technologies are starting to attract the media and with Where 2.0 and Web 2.0 in full swing, the GeoWeb emerges as a term.
In November the OS demos OpenSpace, even if it did take a year to release.
In December people start talking about Neogeography
a socially networked mapping platform which makes it easy to find, create, share, and publish maps and places Di-Ann Eisnor
Neogeography means new geography and consists of a set of techniques and tools that fall outside the realm of traditional GIS, Geographic Information Systems. Where historically a professional cartographer might use ArcGIS, talk of Mercator versus Mollweide projections, and resolve land area disputes, a neogeographer uses a mapping API like Google Maps, talks about GPX versus KML, and geotags his photos to make a map of his summer vacation. Essentially, Neogeography is about people using and creating their own maps, on their own terms and by combining elements of an existing toolset. Neogeography is about sharing location information with friends and visitors, helping shape context, and conveying understanding through knowledge of place. Lastly, Neogeography is fun Andrew Turner
At the start of 2007, Google launches StreetView to an at best indifferent public and at worst to cries of invasion of privacy. Initially using Immersive Media data, soon Google are driving the streets, but with cameras that aren’t only looking from side to side but also up and down.
The following month Google adds draggable routing to their maps. Originally using Telcontar but replaced with Google’s own technology a year later. As Google’s Ed Parsons notes “routing algorithms aren’t rocket science; by scaling them are”. Notice the continuing pattern here. Google buys technology and then builds on top of it. Other web maps vendors are left trailing by this move.
By July there’s sufficient OSM users to hold the first annual State Of The Map conference.
By 2007, there’s 50,000 Google Maps mashups. Google Maps has 71.5M users per month; Google Earth 22.7M users per month
In 2007 Nokia acquires NAVTEQ and launches Ovi Maps
The same year, Microsoft is firmly back in the web maps game and acquires MultiMap.
In 2008 Google wants to save on the costs that its web mapping activities incur. The main cost saver is the licensing fees that Google pays TeleAtlas. Remember those StreetView cameras that were pointing up and down? Google is making their own map?
Just look at this for a year’s releases to Google Maps, difficult for the other players to keep up! 21 announcements in 1 year! 1. On January 22, 2008, Google expanded the Local Onebox from 3 business listings to 10 2. On February 20, 2008, Google Maps allowed searches to be refined by User Rating & neighbourhoods. 3. On March 18, 2008, Google allowed end users to edit business listings and add new places. 4. On March 19, 2008, Google added unlimited category options in the Local Business Center. 5. On April 2, 2008, Google added contour lines to the Terrain view. 6. In April 2008, a button to view recent Saved Locations was added to the right of the search field. 7. In May 2008, a "More" button was added alongside the "Map", "Satellite", and "Terrain" buttons, permitting access to geographically-related photos on Panoramio and articles on Wikipedia 8. On May 15, 2008, Google Maps was ported to Flash and ActionScript 3 as a foundation for richer internet applications. 9. On July 15, 2008, walking directions were added. 10. On August 4, 2008, Street View launched in Japan and Australia. 11. On August 15, 2008, the user interface was redesigned. 12. On August 29, 2008, Google signed a deal under which GeoEye would supply them with imagery from a satellite and introduced the Map Maker tool for creation of map data. 13. On September 9, 2008, a reverse business lookup feature was added. 14. On September 23, 2008, information for the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority was added.
And finally in 2009 and in the US at least, Google ways goodbye to TeleAtlas.
Jul 2010 and MapQuest starts using open source and open data through OpenStreetMap. There’s several drivers here. One is cost. Another is a trial to see how good crowd sourced maps really are. Microsoft follows suite, announcing use of OSM data and OSM’s founder, Steve Coast, joins Microsoft.
By the end of 2010, 350,000 web sites are using Google’s Maps API
In 2011, Nokia’s Ovi maps rebrand to Nokia Maps
Nokia starts to build on the strength of the mapping services gained by acquiring NAVTEQ and partners with Yahoo!, replacing their native maps with Nokia’s own
And then something happened that really brought the ubiquity of digital maps, on your phone or tablet, to the mainstream media’s attention. All of a sudden tech industry commentators, who should really know better and who had been proclaiming that making maps wasn’t that hard, changed their tune and proclaimed that making usable digital maps was actually hard after all.
Up to and including version 5, Apple’s iOS had a maps app. It may have been called just “Maps” but it used Google’s mapping technologies on the back end. It was, and up to the end of version 5, remained one of the most popular and often used apps that came on a new iPhone or iPad. But in September 2012 when Apple released iOS 6, the maps app, still called “Maps” was replaced by the much heralded Apple native offering and millions of anguished iOS used cried out ...
... as they got directed onto the middle of an airport runway
... as bridges just vanished
... and as Las Vegas apparently melted under the heat of the midday Nevada sun
Originally Google was seen by Apple as a partner but for a variety of reasons, including the growth of Google’s Android phone OS, Apple decided to replace Google’s maps with their own. Apple makes an embarrassing public apology and recommends rival mapping platforms including those by Nokia, Microsoft and MapQuest as alternative while they make Apple Maps better.
In November 2012, Yahoo! finally shuts down their maps API, after partnering with Nokia and NAVTEQ to provide their mapping services. Despite being one of the digital maps pioneers, Yahoo! is out of the maps game.
Capitalising on the problems surrounding Apple’s maps, Google releases a native iOS app and quickly gains 10M downloads in 48 hours as iOS users sigh with relief.
Just as with Yahoo!, Microsoft and Bing pretty much exit the mapping game as Nokia takes over their mapping services
And Nokia maps rebrands as HERE maps in San Francisco
So that’s the story of the ubiquitous digital map up until the present day. I’ve missed out a lot of other significant developments and milestones in this story but this is the abridged version. But where does the digital map go from here?
The explosion of maps, location based services and digital cartography has been made possible by several factors ... the ever falling price of data storage. In 1980 a 26 MB disk drive cost $5,000, that’s $193,000 per GB. By 1990, the cost per GB had fallen to $9,000 per GB. In 2000 that cost was down to around $15 per GB and in 2009 a 1 TB drive cost just $75, working out at $0.07 per GB. Over the last 30 years, space per unit cost has doubled roughly every 14 months (increasing by an order of magnitude every 48 months).
At the same time, CPUs have got faster as Moore’s Law continues to be true and the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years. Digital maps take up a lot of data and a lot of computing power to render and this has got progressively easier with each passing year.
Of course, the best digital maps in the world are severely reduced in effectiveness if the only way people can access them is via a dial up modem, so hand in hand with cheap storage and faster processors, the availability of broadband internet connections and 3G and now 4G mobile data networks have allowed digital maps to become ever more widespread and easier and faster to access.
Although a lot of the original pioneers have led the playing field, either sinking as part of the dot bomb crash or outsourcing to other maps providers, such as Yahoo! and Microsoft have done
And although there’s been massive consolidation and concentration in the map market, with Nokia buying NAVTEQ, TomTom buying TeleAtlas, Google making their own maps and OSM generally disrupting everyone
There’s been an explosion of interest in digital maps and the way in which these maps are used over the last few years
And we’ve gained a whole new set of terms in the English language into the bargain.
It’s never been easier to put a map onto a mobile device or onto a web site and companies such as MapBox are capitalising on this by letting you not only make your own maps but also letting you create your own style of maps
I started this talk with the notion that early maps were art and I think we’ve come full circle, with companies like San Francisco’s Stamen producing maps that are not only effective but are also, to my mind at least visually gorgeous and qualify as art.
The growth, variety and use of the ubiquitous digital map shows no sign of stopping; I think the state of the map, to steal OpenStreetMap’s conference name, is one with a very bright future indeed.
Finally, here’s that short URL again ...
... and thanks for listening
Oh people of the interwebs; you are indeed a wondrous thing. If you build something and put it up on the internet, you've no expectation that anyone will see it, let alone look at it. But it appears that the combination of innuendo and some vaguely sounding rude place names (actually with some very rude place names) seems to be something that the citizens of the internet actually like.
The map hit the internet at maps.geotastic.org/rude/ around lunchtime on the 6th. of February; since then, several things have happened.
Firstly, Eric Rodenbeck, the CEO of Stamen Design, whose map tiles I used on the Rude Map, dropped me an email to say he liked it. I'm a massive fan of the cartography that Stamen produces and this would, alone, be enough to make the making of the map worthwhile.
But then, the URL of the site started proliferating over Twitter ... including Jonathan Crowe, author of the late and utterly lamented Map Room blog.
Then the map started to get written about. Firstly by The Independent, then by Laughing Squid, Blame It On The Voices, Reddit and io9.
And it keeps on getting mentions on Twitter, on Google+ and other social networks. According to the server logs, the map's been viewed a staggering (to me at least) 53,000 times; this definitely classes as a first for me. So with tongue firmly in cheek and innuendo firmly in mind, it seems that if you build it, they will come can be the case sometimes.
All of which, makes me wonder ... what should I build a map of next?
No-one can really define what being British is, though many have tried. One thing that lots of people do seem to agree on is that part of being British is a love for and an appreciation of the British sense of humour. This can be roughly and with a sweeping generalisation said to consist of equal parts of finding fun in everyday situations Peep Show), satire and parody (Have I Got News For You), social awkwardness (The Office), surrealism and nonsense (Monty Python) and innuendo (the Carry On films).
Focus on that trait of innuendo for a moment. Could you possibly combine the British fondness for innuendo with geography and put it on a map? It turns out you can. So I did. It may be vaguely NSFW but there's real geographical data behind this.
Maybe it's part of bring British, but an airport whose code is BUM is just ... funny.
As a classic Web 2.0 style maps mashup, this is never going to win any awards for originality or innovativeness. But the source of each of these vaguely rude sounding names was from Yahoo's WOE data set, before the data was released via the GeoPlanet API and (currently offline) GeoPlanet Data download. A list of real but amusing sounding place names, culled from GeoPlanet by one of the old Yahoo! Geo team, has been sitting in a file on one of my backup drives for too many years now. But given a geographic data set. Stamen's wonderful Toner map tiles and a JavaScript maps API, in this case Leaflet, the temptation to make a map out of it all was just too strong.
Yes it's a map, yes it's geographical innuendo and yes, it's very much part of the British sense of humour. If you're British, try not to snigger too much; if you're not British, just shake your head sadly and mutter "those crazy Brits".
In October of 2012, whilst sorting through my father's personal effects, I was proud to find that I wasn't the first map nerd in the family and that maps seemed to mean as much to my Dad as they do to me.
Lumped in with my father's posessions were also some things from my childhood which my parents had kept, either for sentimental reasons or in the hope that one day, I might have children who might want some of my toys, books and games.
At the weekend, I had another clear out and came across some jigsaws I had when I was around 8 or so years old.
Maps jigsaws from the early 1970's of Australia, the US, India and the UK; maybe I was a map nerd even as a child and just didn't know it then.
It seems that writing about map projections is a little bit like waiting for one of London's iconic red buses; you write one and immediately another one comes along. As I mentioned in my last post, rightly or wrongly, the most commonly used map projection is the Mercator projection. It's not without it's problems or detractors.
A Mercator map gets more distorted the further north or south of the Equator you move. This is often referred to as The Greenland Problem. Greenland has an area of roughly 0.8 million square miles. Africa on the other hand has an area of roughly 11.6 million square miles. So on the map Africa should be roughly ten times the size of Greenland. Right?
But on a Mercator map it doesn't appear so; both Greenland and Africa look to be approximately the same size; and don't even get me started on how Antarctica is now smeared across the bottom of the map.
A really effective way to show this distortion in action is the Mercator Puzzle by Luke Mahe of the Google Maps Developer Relations Team. Drag and drop the red shapes, which represent countries, around the map; watch them shrink as you near the Equator and expand and distort as you move towards the poles.
It's a nice geographical puzzle and an equally nice way of showing Mercator in action; how many of the 15 countries did you manage to find their correct homes for? If you're really stuck, there's a solution here; but no peeking unless you really get stuck!
Picture Credits: Mercator Map Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA 3.0.
Whenever you look at a map, be it on the web, on your mobile or on your wall there's a compromise. The compromise is the map's projection. Or to put it another way, the way in which the roughly spherical lump of rock we live on can be unwrapped and displayed in a flat, two dimensional manner.
There's lots of way of doing this and the ways come with wonderful, almost eccentric sounding names. There's the pseudo-cylindrical projections; Sanson-Flamsteed, Luximuthal or Kavrayskiy's Fifth Projection (no idea what happened to the first four). There's the conic projections; Lambert's Conformal or War Office Polyconic. There's the pseudo-conic projections; Stabius-Werner and Bonne. Or there's the modified azimuthal projections; Wiechel's or Winkel's Tripel Projection.
There's just so many ways of projecting the Earth onto a map. But there's also the one we're all familiar with. It's Gerardus Mercator's Projection and we've been using it, probably without knowing it, since 1569 and it's showing no sign of going away.
So in the end, it all boils down to this ...
... which group are you in?
Cartotastic image fun by Tobin Bradley at Fuzzy Tolerance thanks to CC-BY-SA.
Most things in life are a journey and the destination of this particular journey was to try and create a custom map style that represented the unique features and challenges of Tandale.
Which meant I needed to download and install TileMill, an interactive map design tool.
Which meant I needed to learn Carto, the CSS-like language for map styling.
Which meant I looked for a template project so I didn't have to start from scratch.
Which meant I found OSM Bright.
Which meant I needed to start small and find a map extract of Tanzania to work with.
Which meant I needed to install and configure PostgreSQL and PostGIS on my Mac.
Which brings me to the starting point of the journey and the reason for this post in the first place.
When I normally need to install UNIX-y command line and server tools I turn to Homebrew, the tool set that "installs the stuff you need that Apple didn't". Homebrew supports installing both PostgreSQL and PostGIS but a bit of background research showed that installing these on Lion and on Mountain Lion could be problematic. A bit of further research soon turned up Postgres.app, which claims to be "the easiest way to run PostgreSQL on the Mac". Postgres.app is a single shot installer which wraps PostgreSQL and PostGIS into an easy to install and run self contained environment.
I'm a big fan of this approach to a software development environment. All of the stuff I've put up on GitHub and on WordPress.org has been written using MAMP, the single shot installer which wraps up Apache, MySQL and PHP on the Mac so Postgres.app gave instant appeal to me. So, download, install, start.
Next I found an OSM map extract of Tanzania courtesy of GeoFabrik, which I also downloaded. Now to load the map into PostgreSQL. I made sure my shell's PATH pointed to the command line tools provided by Postgres.app by prepending /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/MacOS/bin to the PATH defined in my .bash_profile, ran psql and created a database called tanzania. So far so good.
$ psql psql (9.2.2) Type "help" for help. gary=# CREATE DATABASE tanzania; CREATE DATABASE gary=# \q
To load the map into the database I had a choice of two command line tools; Imposm or osm2pgsql. The latter of the two seemed to work out of the box according to the documentation so I used Homebrew to install this tool.
$ brew install osm2pgsql
Now to load the map ...
$ osm2pgsql -c -G -U gary -d tanzania ~/Projects/maps/data/tanzania.osm.pbf osm2pgsql SVN version 0.81.0 (64bit id space) Using projection SRS 900913 (Spherical Mercator) Setting up table: planet_osm_point NOTICE: table "planet_osm_point" does not exist, skipping NOTICE: table "planet_osm_point_tmp" does not exist, skipping SELECT AddGeometryColumn('planet_osm_point', 'way', 900913, 'POINT', 2 ); failed: ERROR: function addgeometrycolumn(unknown, unknown, integer, unknown, integer) does not exist LINE 1: SELECT AddGeometryColumn('planet_osm_point', 'way', 900913, ... ^ HINT: No function matches the given name and argument types. You might need to add explicit type casts. Error occurred, cleaning up
The lack of the AddGeometryColumn function was the clue here. Whilst Postgres.app may come with PostGIS, my custom database was lacking all the PostGIS functionality. So I deleted my initial database and tried to recreate it with the template_postgis template, which also failed.
$ psql psql (9.2.2) Type "help" for help. gary=# DROP DATABASE tanzania; DROP DATABASE gary=# CREATE DATABASE tanzania TEMPLATE=template_postgis; ERROR: template database "template_postgis" does not exist gary=# \q
Updated 24.12.12
As Regina correctly pointed out in the comments, I didn't really need to go through the manual process of loading the PostGIS template, the create extension postgis command in psql would have done this for me much quicker and elegantly, reducing the commands to setup my database to just two statements ...
$ psql psql (9.2.2) Type "help" for help. gary=# CREATE DATABASE tanzania; CREATE DATABASE gary=# \connect tanzania; You are now connected to database "tanzania" as user "gary". tanzania=# CREATE EXTENSION postgis; CREATE EXTENSION gary=# \q
... simple when you know how.
So I needed to create the template_postgis database from scratch, loading in the postgis.sql and spatial_ref_sys.sql SQL files and then recreate my custom database, based on the template contained in the template_postgis database. The PostGIS SQL files are supplied as part of Postgres.app, if you know where to look for them; you'll find them inside the app's container in /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/MacOS/share/contrib/postgis-2.0.
$ createdb template_postgis $ createlang plpgsql template_postgis createlang: language "plpgsql" is already installed in database "template_postgis" $ psql -d template_postgis -f /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/MacOS/share/contrib/postgis-2.0/postgis.sql SET BEGIN CREATE FUNCTION CREATE FUNCTION CREATE TYPE ... COMMIT $ psql -d template_postgis -f /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/MacOS/share/contrib/postgis-2.0/spatial_ref_sys.sql BEGIN INSERT 0 1 ... COMMIT ANALYZE $ psql psql (9.2.2) Type "help" for help. gary=# CREATE DATABASE tanzania TEMPLATE=template_postgis; CREATE DATABASE gary=# \q
Now, at last, I was able to load my Tanzanian map.
$ osm2pgsql -c -G -U gary -d tanzania ~/Projects/maps/data/tanzania.osm.pbf osm2pgsql SVN version 0.81.0 (64bit id space) Using projection SRS 900913 (Spherical Mercator) Setting up table: planet_osm_point NOTICE: table "planet_osm_point" does not exist, skipping NOTICE: table "planet_osm_point_tmp" does not exist, skipping Setting up table: planet_osm_line NOTICE: table "planet_osm_line" does not exist, skipping NOTICE: table "planet_osm_line_tmp" does not exist, skipping Setting up table: planet_osm_polygon NOTICE: table "planet_osm_polygon" does not exist, skipping NOTICE: table "planet_osm_polygon_tmp" does not exist, skipping Setting up table: planet_osm_roads NOTICE: table "planet_osm_roads" does not exist, skipping NOTICE: table "planet_osm_roads_tmp" does not exist, skipping Allocating memory for dense node cache Allocating dense node cache in one big chunk Allocating memory for sparse node cache Sharing dense sparse Node-cache: cache=800MB, maxblocks=102401*8192, allocation method=3 Mid: Ram, scale=100 Reading in file: /Users/gary/Projects/maps/data/tanzania.osm.pbf Processing: Node(6820k 682.0k/s) Way(980k 16.90k/s) Relation(23580 1122.86/s) parse time: 89s Node stats: total(6820388), max(1910954191) in 10s Way stats: total(980191), max(180648305) in 58s Relation stats: total(23580), max(2409445) in 21s Committing transaction for planet_osm_point Committing transaction for planet_osm_line Committing transaction for planet_osm_polygon Committing transaction for planet_osm_roads Writing way (980k) Committing transaction for planet_osm_point Committing transaction for planet_osm_line Committing transaction for planet_osm_polygon Committing transaction for planet_osm_roads Writing relation (23569) Sorting data and creating indexes for planet_osm_point Sorting data and creating indexes for planet_osm_line Sorting data and creating indexes for planet_osm_polygon node cache: stored: 6820388(100.00%), storage efficiency: 50.68% (dense blocks: 637, sparse nodes: 6403164), hit rate: 99.45% Sorting data and creating indexes for planet_osm_roads Analyzing planet_osm_point finished Analyzing planet_osm_polygon finished Analyzing planet_osm_roads finished Analyzing planet_osm_line finished Copying planet_osm_point to cluster by geometry finished Copying planet_osm_roads to cluster by geometry finished Creating indexes on planet_osm_roads finished All indexes on planet_osm_roads created in 12s Completed planet_osm_roads Copying planet_osm_polygon to cluster by geometry finished Copying planet_osm_line to cluster by geometry finished Creating indexes on planet_osm_point finished All indexes on planet_osm_point created in 21s Completed planet_osm_point Creating indexes on planet_osm_polygon finished All indexes on planet_osm_polygon created in 28s Completed planet_osm_polygon Creating indexes on planet_osm_line finished All indexes on planet_osm_line created in 30s Completed planet_osm_line Osm2pgsql took 218s overall
One final gotcha awaited though. Restarting Postgres.app later that day made psql fail with an error.
$ psql psql: could not connect to server: No such file or directory Is the server running locally and accepting connections on Unix domain socket "/tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432"?
Although Postgres.app was running, it looked like the server wasn't. Checking the system error logs via Console.app showed me that my newly populated database was running out of shared memory.
22/12/2012 11:05:44.319 com.heroku.postgres-service: FATAL: could not create shared memory segment: Cannot allocate memory 22/12/2012 11:05:44.319 com.heroku.postgres-service: DETAIL: Failed system call was shmget(key=5432001, size=3809280, 03600). 22/12/2012 11:05:44.319 com.heroku.postgres-service: HINT: This error usually means that PostgreSQL's request for a shared memory segment exceeded available memory or swap space, or exceeded your kernel's SHMALL parameter. You can either reduce the request size or reconfigure the kernel with larger SHMALL. To reduce the request size (currently 3809280 bytes), reduce PostgreSQL's shared memory usage, perhaps by reducing shared_buffers or max_connections. 22/12/2012 11:05:44.319 com.heroku.postgres-service: The PostgreSQL documentation contains more information about shared memory configuration. 22/12/2012 11:20:40.584 com.heroku.postgres-service: server starting
Thankfully this is a known problem; PostgreSQL is really a server application, not a laptop application. The default Mac configuration isn't enough to support a medium sized PostgreSQL database, but adding the following configuration settings to /etc/sysctl.conf, creating it via sudo if it doesn't already exist and rebooting solved that final problem.
kern.sysv.shmmax=1610612736 kern.sysv.shmall=393216 kern.sysv.shmmin=1 kern.sysv.shmmni=32 kern.sysv.shmseg=8 kern.maxprocperuid=512 kern.maxproc=2048
I now have a working PostgreSQL and PostGIS install, with a map loaded, which TileMill can access. Now all I need to do is learn Carto and actually make the map I originally set out to do ... another learning journey has started.
In November 2008 I was still working for Yahoo and a fledgling meetup event for people interested in maps, location, geo and mobile started up in London. It was, and still is, called GeoMob. I was at GeoMob's very first event, talking about Yahoo's Fire Eagle location brokering platform. Four years later and it was great to go back, see GeoMob still flourishing despite a brief hiatus in 2010, and meet up with a lot of old friends as well as meet some new ones.
And what an evening it was. Truly a veritable feast of maps. David Overton spoke about SplashMaps, his Kickstarter funded project to produce lightweight printable fabric maps for outdoors.
I didn't think it was possible to map happiness but apparently it is and George MacKerron showed how with the aptly entitled Mappiness project.
Staying with tangible maps, Anna Butler from Wellingtons Travel wowed the audience with her lovingly hand drawn map of the centre of London, styled after the glorious illustrated maps of yesteryear. Almost all the audience immediately added a copy of her map to their Christmas lists en masse.
And then there was James Cheshire who, along with Ollie O'Brien, runs Spatial Analysis and they'd produced Lives On The Line, a map of the life expectancy of Londoners along the path of the London Underground lines. Not only maps, but Tube maps. What more can you want?
Finally, standing between the audience and a thirst quenching GeoBeer or two, it was my turn. This wasn't my usual talk. No mapporn. Not even that many pithy or wryly amusing images. Just some raising of awareness for the W3G conference and the AGI. As usual, the slide deck is below and the notes follow after the break.
[scribd id=114211713 key=key-1fshphqj3fe65ojic5s7 mode=scroll]
Slide 2
So, hello, I’m Gary and I’m from the Internet. I’m a self-confessed map addict, a geo-technologist and a geographer. I’m Director of Web & Community for Nokia’s Location and Commerce group. Prior to Nokia I led Yahoo’s Geotechnologies group in the United Kingdom. I’m a founder of the Location Forum, a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, I sit on the Council for the AGI, the UK’s Association for Geographic Information, I’m the chair of the W3G conference and I’m also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
Slide 3
There are URLs in this talk but this is the only URL in the entirety of this talk you might want to take a note of. Although if you go there right now, it’ll 404 on you, later today or tomorrow, this is where this slide deck, my notes and all the links you’ll be seeing will appear on my blog. That’s a lower case “l” and a lower case “h” at the end of the URL by the way ...
Slide 4
Before I get started I just want a moment to pay my respects to the first mapping API I ever used in anger. After being slated for closure in September of last year, the Yahoo! Maps API finally got turned off round about 1.30 PM London time today.
Slide 5
Now, despite being the aforementioned map addict, I'm not going to be talking about Apple's recent foray into the world of smartphone based digital mapping, tempting though it is.
Slide 6
It also looks like at least one member of the audience tonight was hoping to hear about Nokia's new Here maps platform.
Slide 7
But I'm not going to be talking about that either I'm afraid, though if GeoMob invites me back I'll be more than happy to do so.
Slide 8
Instead, my brief talk tonight starts off with "Hello, I'm Gary and I want to talk to you about W3G and the AGI" ...
Slide 9
So what's the best possible outcome from a statement like that from you, the audience?
Slide 10
It's probably something along the lines of "Ah. Yes. W3G. We've heard about that conference. Err. What's the AGI?".
Slide 11
That's the best outcode. But is it a realistic outcome?
Slide 12
That's probably along the lines of "The AGI? Oh yes. That's the GIS organisation. Nothing to do with me".
Slide 13
But actually there's a more probable outcome ...
Slide 14
It's along the lines of "Eh? W3G? That's the World Wide Web Consortium and you've spelt it wrong. AG what? Never heard of 'em".
Slide 15
So to change this probable outcome, it's time for some audience participation, which involves nothing more than sticking your hand up in the air.
Slide 16
Who here uses or works with maps? Maps APIs? Big Data? LBS? LBMS? Anything related to the concept of "geo"?
Slide 17
Despite the glorious maps we look at and work with, today's digital maps that we interact with are just the tip of the iceberg and what we all work with is really GI ... Geographic Information.
Slide 18
And this is where W3G comes in.
Slide 19
W3G is an (un)conference. The parentheses are important here. It's the unique combination of invited guest speakers and open format foocamp style unconference sessions.
Slide 20
We've probably all encountered what I call the conference curve of despair. Where you see a conference you'd like to attend but it's too expensive and it's not even in the country you live in, let alone the city you live in.
Slide 21
But W3G follows the unconference line of elation. It's free and it's local.
Slide 22
Next year will be W3G's fourth consecutive year.
Slide 23
W3G 2010's theme was the 3 W's of Geo, the where, the what and then when
Slide 24
In 2011 the theme was that there's more to Geo than merely just maps and check-ins.
Slide 25
But just because W3G is free to attend doesn't mean it's free to put on. We're able to do his through the cold hard cash that our sponsors put up and also because of W3G's parent ...
Slide 26
... the AGI ... the UK's Association For Geographic Information. The AGI is uniquely positioned to inform, react, connect and communicate on all matters relating to geographic information. From startups to global enterprises. From developers to business development. From local to central government. From classic GIS through to whatever the successor to Web 2.0 is called these days. I think it's a worthy endeavour. So much so that I sit on the AGI's governing council.
Slide 27
If you think this is a worthy endeavour and want to find out more, the interwebs can help.
Slide 28
W3G maintains a web site and a Twitter feed
Slide 29
And so does the AGI. Take a look. Get in touch. Thank you.
Nothing on the interwebs is forever. Services start up and either become successful, get acquired or shut down. If they shut down they usually end up in TechCrunch's deadpool. The same applies for APIs and when they finally go offline, they usually end up in the Programmable Web deadpool.
At around 1.30 PM London time yesterday, the Yahoo! Maps API got added to the Programmable Web deadpool for good. Despite the announcement I wrote about last year that it was being shutdown on September 13, 2011, up until yesterday the API was very much alive and well and still serving up map tiles, markers and polylines via JavaScript.
Yesterday I was running some tests on the latest pre-release version of Mapstraction, which still supported the Yahoo! Maps API and they were running without error all morning. Then they stopped. The API just wasn't there anymore.
$ wget https://api.maps.yahoo.com/ajaxymap?v=3.8&appid=(redacted)
Resolving api.maps.yahoo.com... 98.139.25.243
Connecting to api.maps.yahoo.com|98.139.25.243|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 503 Service Unavailable
A quick look at the API's home on the web at developer.yahoo.com/maps/ajax/ shows an update to the previous shutting down message, with developers now being redirected to developer.here.net, the home of Nokia's new Here Maps API.
So whilst the demise of the Yahoo! Maps API in September of last year proved to be somewhat exaggerated, the plug has now been well and truly pulled.
I'll always have a soft spot for the Yahoo! API; it was the first mapping API I really cut my teeth on and while things change on the interwebs on a daily basis I can't help but feel sadly nostalgic.
This does mean that the next release of Mapstraction will no longer support the Yahoo! Maps API, though it will support Nokia Maps and Here Maps. My signed copy of Charles Freedman's Yahoo! Maps Mashups will also continue to remain on my office bookshelf as a memento.
Ah ... art. Art is a contentious area for discussion. One person's work of art is another person's random spots of paint on a canvas. As Rudyard Kipling once put it, "it's clever, but is it art?".
Even artists can't seem to agree on this topic. Compare and contrast Picasso's comment that "everything you can imagine is real" with Warhol's contrarian stance that "an artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have".
Now add maps into the equation and you have a debate where people probably won't always agree. So it was with a conversation on Twitter between myself, Steve Chilton, chair of the Society of Cartographers and psychogeographer Graham Hooper. We were talking about a map like this one ...
Graham kickstarted the discussion with a fear that the ultimate map, by today's standards, is merely more accurate old data in a new format. He's got a point. A lot of today's maps, particularly digital ones, do take existing data and put a subtly different slant on the way that it's visualised. He continued with "surely maps, in the broadest sense, need to add value to what is mapped rather than just copy or repeat it in inferior form".
Here's where the debate gets onto thin ice. The notion of what's inferior is a deeply subjective thing. Likewise, adding value is a much maligned phrase that can mean pretty much anything depending on your interpretation. My ultimate map, if such a thing even exists, will probably differ significantly from yours.
Steve countered with "maps represent the real word, it's not about being inferior; they can categorise, explain, illustrate and open up that world".
The map in question is one of those produced by artPause and Graham questioned whether any of these maps "present a new or better understanding, appreciation or awareness of our world".
I should probably nail my colours to the mast here.
A map can be art. I think I have to side with Steve on this point. Maps as art definitely illustrate our world and they definitely make us appreciate someone else's view of our world. Yes, they're produced from existing data, or at least the current data at the time they were made. But if you like maps, you'll probably like maps as art, even if you sometimes need to put your head to one side, squint a bit and mutter "it's clever, but is it art?".
Photo Credits: artPause and Kaptain Kobold on Etsy.
Warning. This post contains a sweeping generalisation. Yes, I know that Places are not just part of today's digital maps; see the James Fee and Tyler Bell hangout The One Where Tyler Bell Defines Big Data as a proof point. But for the sake of this post, just assume that Places and maps are synonymous.
It's never been easier to make a map. Correction. It's never been easier to contribute to a map. Today we seem to be makingcontributing to maps everywhere, even underground, or should I say Underground?
To makecontribute to a map, you used to have to be a professional map maker, with easy access to an arsenal of surveying or an industrial grade GPS.
Then came the notion of community mapping. Be it OpenStreetMap, Navteq's and Nokia's Map Creator or Google's Map Maker, anyone armed with a GPS enabled smartphone, hell, anyone without a GPS, could help make a map.
And now it seems, all you need to do to help make a map is to be somewhere unmapped with some form of internet access, be it a 3G or 4G cellular data connection, or a wifi connection. As part of the London 2012 Olympic Games, some London Underground stations (finally) got wifi access and sure enough, where wifi goes, so does mapping, even platforms on the London Underground.
With apologies to Steve Karmeinsky for exposing part of his Foursquare check-in history.
Updated September 13th. 2012 with embedded YouTube video.
Wednesday September 5th. 2012 was a day of maps. To be precise, it was a day of maps, maps and MOAR maps. Two events, two talks, back to back. Packed choc-a-bloc full of maps. I also cheated slightly.
Firstly there was the International Cartographical Association's first session of the newly formed Commission on Neocartography. Cartography, neocartography, maps; what is there not to like? I'd previously spoken at the UK's Society of Cartographer's annual conference so it was great to be asked by Steve Chilton, SoC and Neocartography chair, to speak at the Neocartography Commission.
For a change, the talk title and abstract I gave Steve didn't vary during the usual researching and writing of the talk.
`Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Mime-Version: 1.0 (Apple Message framework v1278) Subject: Re: Neocartography workshop X-Universally-Unique-Identifier: d1c70302-eaba-4132-80fb-f74eb1de2347 From: Gary Gale In-Reply-To: DEC2FCE18B20734CAFA668E438482963834F621862@WGFP-EXMBV1.uni.mdx.ac.uk Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2012 14:13:39 +0100 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Smtp-Server: mail.vicchi.org:redacted Message-Id: BEB576E2-3E8C-4136-803A-0CE5E5456C26@vicchi.org To: Steve Chilton
Actually, I'm going to change the title ... what I'd really like to see up on the web site is this ...
Title: History Repeats Itself And So Does The Map Abstract: Steve Chilton says this just MIGHT be interesting; you'll have to take his word for this
... but that might not work. So try this for size instead
Title: History Repeats Itself And So Does The Map Abstract: History has a habit of repeating itself and so does the map. From primitive scratchings, through ever more sumptuous pieces of art, through to authoritative geographical representations, the map changes throughout history. Maps speak of the hopes, dreams and prejudices of their creators and audience alike, and with the advent of neogeography and neocartography, maps are again as much art as they are geographical information.
... will that do?
G`
But then, no sooner had I got one event for that Wednesday when fellow Yahoo! alumni and now Expedia developer and chief evangelist Steve Marshall asked me to team up with ex-Doppleran and ex-Nokian Matt Biddulph at Expedia's EAN World of Data event which was cunningly masquerading as a BBQ that very Wednesday evening. So I cheated. One day. Loads of maps. Two events. But one talk. Only time will tell whether I got away with it or not.
My talk at the Neocartography workshop was filmed and you can watch it below, if you like that sort of thing. Personally I hate seeing myself on video, it's even more excrutiating than hearing myself on audio.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSRWy9kMf00]
As usual, the slide deck, plus notes are embedded below, also if you like that sort of thing.
[scribd id=105081787 key=key-28dj39ezex1j55yczevw mode=scroll]
Slide 3
So, hello, I’m Gary and I'm from the internet. I’m a self-confessed map addict, a geo-technologist and a geographer. I’m Director of Places for Nokia’s Location and Commerce group. Prior to Nokia I led Yahoo’s Geotechnologies group in the United Kingdom. I’m a founder of the Location Forum, a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, I sit on the Council for the AGI, the UK’s Association for Geographic Information, I’m the chair of the W3G conference and I’m also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
Slide 4
Most of my talk have a lot of links in them and sometimes I see people rushing to take a note of them if they see something they think is interesting. You might want to do this too, but don't ...
Slide 5
... this is the only URL in the entirety of this talk you might want to take a note of. It's nice and short and easy to scrawl down. Although if you go there right now, it'll just take you to the home page of my blog, but sometime tomorrow or the day after this is where this slide deck, my notes and all the links you'll be seeing will appear.
https://vtny.org/kk Slide 6
It's also fair to say that this talk is something approaching a personal first. When I'm asked to give a talk, I'm usually asked for a title and an abstract some 3 or so months before the talk. That's also a long time before I actually start writing the talk.
Slide 7 / Slide 8
... but this time, not only has the talk title stayed the same, the abstract still fits and it's even the talk I set out to write, and I have the email to prove it.
Slide 9
But enough about me. Let's set some context. We live in a connected world of interwebs and mobiles. Some of you probably know of this thing on the interwebs called Twitter which has hashtags to identify common themes. A popular hashtag is for people who like to take photos of their food. They use the hashtag #foodporn.
Slide 10
Well I take photos of maps and there's lots of maps in this talk. You could say it's pure unadulterated #mapporn and I make no apology for it.
Slide 11
But before I talk about today's maps, I want to set a little historical context.
Slide 12
This is one of the earliest maps we know of, of the world as the Babylonians thought of it. Babylon is in the centre of the map and there's seven triangular islands, 3 of which are missing due to damage, in the "river of bitter water", or the sea. To me, the Babylon map is both art, hope and inspiration for the unmapped areas of their world and the best attempt of the age to be authoritative.
Slide 13
Fast forward several centuries to the "golden age of exploration" and while maps are more recognisably accurate, they're still art. But this art came at a price. You needed to be wealthy to commission such a map and such a map was often given as a notional gift to the rich and powerful to curry favour.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/normanbleventhalmapcenter/2675672726/ Slide 14
Furthermore maps were state secrets; sharing maps was sharing power and influence. The entrepreneurs of the time were the great navigators like Columbus and Magellan, their sponsors were kings and countries; their business plan were maps.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/normanbleventhalmapcenter/5385389984/ Slide 15
But maps don't just have to be geographically accurate. They can show data as well. This 1869 map by Charles Minard shows the losses suffered by Napoleon's army in his 1812 Russian campaign. Beginning at the Polish/Russian border on the left, the thick pinkish band shows the size of the army as they advanced towards Moscow. The thinner black band shows the ever decreasing size of the remains of the army as they retreated in the bitterly cold winter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Minard.png Slide 16
Another type of not necessarily geographically accurate map are the familiar mass transit and metro maps that you probably all recognise, all descended in some shape or form from Harry Beck's iconic map of London's Tube system.
Slide 17
And then, there's the map that most people of my generation will find immediately familiar, the Ordnance Survey map, from the printed version of the pink LandRanger series of maps through to the online version still found at certain zoom levels on streetmap.co.uk.
Slide 18
And no far too quick resume of maps would be complete without the maps we use on an almost daily basis, from Nokia ...
Slide 19
... from Google
Slide 20
... from Bing
Slide 21
... and from OpenStreetMap. All of these are pretty much authoritative, geographically accurate and cartographically pleasing to the eye. But from the maps of 16th and 17th centuries to today's web and mobile maps, there's something missing. There's some brilliant cartography at work but the art seems to have gotten lost somewhere along the way. Or has it?
Slide 22
This map of where I live, using the Watercolor style from San Francisco based Stamen, is as geographically accurate and authoritative as the maps from Nokia, Google and others, but to my mind this is most definitely art. It also happens to be my second favourite map.
Slide 23
So how did we get here ...
Slide 24
... how did we get from cuneiform impressions on a baked mud tablet ...
Slide 25
... to a watercolour style map that, if allowed, I'd want to hang on my wall in a large as possible size as I could get.
Slide 26
I think the answer is data. Lots of data. Easily accessible data, either in bulk or through an API, either free and open or licensed and proprietary. We now have access to the raw spatial data that was previously the preserve of the professional cartographer alone. People can start to make their own maps, their personal, subjective, art maps in ways never previously possible and they can do this because they want to and just because they can.
Slide 27
We can make maps, not only of what is and of what was but also of what might have been but which never came to pass, such as this map of what Berlin would have looked like if Albert Speer's plan for the city had been realised and if the events of 1945 had been very different from what is in our history books.
https://mypantsareonfire.tumblr.com/post/30302438119/albert-speers-new-berlin Slide 28
There's also a flip side to all of this though. Just because we can make maps from all of this wonderful data we now have doesn't always mean we should make maps, such as this gem from the Ottawa Sun which manages to put Saudi Arabia in Africa, puts Iran on the Arabian Peninsula where Saudi Arabia should be, overlooks the fact that the Sudan is now two countries and gets Malaysia and Indonesia confused.
But the topic of bad maps is another talk entirely, so let's get back to good maps. With access to the underlying spatial data and to other data sets with a spatial element, we can now make maps which provide insights into mapping the unmappable. Some cities have formally defined neighbourhoods, London doesn't. But Tom Taylor's Boundaries took a spatially correct map and mashed up Flickr's Alpha data set to show not where London's neighbourhoods are, but where people think the neighbourhoods are. Which may not be 100% accurate but it's a darn sight better to have a notion of where London's neighbourhoods are than no notion at all.
https://boundaries.tomtaylor.co.uk Slide 30
Then there's this map. Definitely one to be filed under the category of "maps because we can", at first sight this map just looks like the US, with lines joining up the notional centroids of each State. Until you start to play with it in a web browser
Slide 31
And all of a sudden you can start to see what would happen if you decided you really didn't want California, Florida or Texas to be where they currently reside. You can play with this for hours. I did. When I really should have been finishing this talk.
https://mbostock.github.com/d3/talk/20111018/force-states.html Slide 32
The more data sets that people produce, the more people can and will make maps with them, so if you'd ever had a yearning to see where people have discovered fossils, for example, then there's a map to show you that. You can argue that this is nothing more than a classic Web 2.0 style maps mashup, but give people a spatial data set and they'll make a map out of it and sometimes that's good enough
https://earth-base.org/fossils Slide 33
But sometimes people will go several steps beyond a maps mash up and produce something which is only just recognisable as a map and is much more about the data visualisation. Like plumegraph.
https://plumegraph.org Slide 34
Here, the map is relegated to a small piece of digital canvas on which the data is projected. But it's still a map, it's still accurate and even if the data being visualised is part of humanity's less attractive side, it's still visually gorgeous. It's still a map.
Slide 35
Now people sometimes make the mistake of assuming that all of this data we're making maps out of is a relatively recent thing. But long before we had the convenient label of "Big Data", organisations such as the NOAA were creating data sets you could make maps out of, we just didn't make the maps until now. So now, we can have temporal as well as spatial maps, such as the tracks of US tornados over the last 56 or so years ...
https://uxblog.idvsolutions.com/2012/05/tornado-tracks.html Slide 36
... or hurricanes over the last 160 or so years. This map is a particular favourite of mine as it subverts the usual mercator projection we tend to see on maps and instead takes a bottom up approach, with Antartica as the focal point, so we can see how these great storms circle around our planet.
https://uxblog.idvsolutions.com/2012/08/hurricanes-since-1851.html Slide 37
Staying with the theme of wind for a moment. This map shows the realtime wind patterns over the United States. Or at least what the wind patterns were on August 31st, when I took this screen shot. It's a nice classic example of a data map. A visualisation of wind patterns. A key of wind speeds. Nothing particularly special. Until you see the realtime aspect ...
https://hint.fm/wind/ Slide 38
... and suddenly the map comes alive. It moves and almost breathes. As with a lot of today's map visualisations, it's oddly compelling and draws you in.
Slide 39
And now, to coin a Monty Python phrase, for something completely different. We're used to seeing maps in Geradus Mercator's map projections. The first maps we see, often at school, or in an atlas at home, tend to be in this projection. It's easy to forget that this is how maps have been projected since 1569. But if you've seen any of the stunning NASA images of our planet as seen from space, you'll probably have noticed that a Mercator map doesn't look like our planet does from space. The map is distorted to fit the projection. Antarctica is this long white smear along the bottom of the map. Greenland is around 60% bigger than it really is.
There's other map projections. Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion map is one of my favourites. It makes a bit more sense if you rotate it through 90 degrees.
https://www.bfi.org/about-bucky/buckys-big-ideas/dymaxion-world/dymaxion-map Slide 40
There's no projection distortion. It shows our planet almost as a single island in a massive ocean. There's no splitting of the continents. As Buckminster Fuller put it "the maps we use still cause humanity to appear inherently disassociated, remote, self-interestedly preoccupied with the political concept of its got to be you or me; there is not enough for both".
https://www.westnet.com/~crywalt/unfold.html Slide 41
There's just one more map to go but before I get there, I wanted to look a little bit ahead to where maps might go if you could interact with them with more than just a finger on a touch screen or a mouse or trackpad on a laptop.
What about putting a boarding pass on a map and it would show you where in the airport your gate is. What about putting a mobile phone on the map and it would show you where you could charge it. What if you could put a credit card on a map and it would show you where a bureau de change or an ATM is? MIT's Media Lab have done just this with TaPuMa, the Tangible Public Map. Maybe this is the next generation of intelligent, interactive maps?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4bz9shk8UU Slide 42
So this is the part of a talk where it's traditional to start to wrap things up and to maybe pontificate where we go from here, or what's going to be happening in a year or so's time.
Sadly, I can't do that. As more and more data becomes available, more and more people are making maps from that data in ways we can't even think of right now. All I can say is that making maps is becoming more and more democratised and while we'll always need formal and authoritative maps, we also have the ability to make our own maps and that ability is becoming easier and easier with each passing month.
Slide 43
And as an example of this democratisation of the map in action, I'll leave you with my personal favourite map, again from Stamen, called Pretty Maps, which seems to be an excellent name as this is definitely a map and it's definitely pretty. Will this be my favourite map in a year's time ... only time, maps and data will tell.
Slide 44
I hope you've enjoyed seeing these maps, as much as I've enjoyed researching them. Thanks for listening.
Photo Credits: Eva-Lotta Lamm on Flickr.
If you're an avid Foursquare user you can already display your last checkin, visualised on a map, in the sidebar of your WordPress powered site with the WP Quadratum plugin. Foursquare, checkins and maps ... what more could you ask for? Maybe the answer is more maps.
Version 1.1 of the WP Quadratum plugin, which went live this morning, now has added maps. The previous versions of the plugin used Nokia's maps, because I work for Nokia's Location & Commerce group and I wanted to use the maps that I work on. But if Nokia's maps aren't the maps for you then how about Google's, or maybe CloudMade's OpenStreetMap maps or perhaps OpenLayers' OpenStreetMap maps.
Thanks to the Mapstraction JavaScript mapping API, WP Quadratum now allows you to choose which mapping provider you'd like to see your checkins appear on. And if you don't want a map on the sidebar of your site, you can embed the checkin map in any post or page with the plugin's shortcode too.
As usual, the plugin is free to download and use, either from the official WordPress plugin repository or from GitHub.
As a fully paid up and self confessed map geek I may be somewhat biased but surely most things can be improved with the simple addition of more maps.
Maps and map imagery seem to be back in the news. Google's recent map update and immense speculation about Apple's "will they, won't they" replacement for the current Google Maps app on iOS seems to be spilling over from the usual tech media into mainstream news.
Firstly, the UK's Daily Telegraph, a "quality broadsheet" seems to have just discovered that today's digital maps also have satellite imagery. It's not entirely clear how this is news, let alone current news. Navteq has had satellite imagery as part of its' maps since the mid 1980's and Google has also included satellite imagery in Google Maps since the mid 2000's. But linked to Apple's recent acquisition of 3D imagery specialists C3, we're told to anticipate a "private fleet of aeroplanes equipped with military standard cameras to produce 3D maps so accurate they could film people in their homes through skylights". The middle market tabloid Daily Mail has also picked up on this story, running with the headline "Spies in the sky that no one will regulate".
Yet only in January of this year, the Daily Mail published a series of extremely detailed aerial images under the headline "A nosey parker's dream; Stunning aerial photographs show what's going on in the world's back gardens". Apart from the slightly sensationalistic "nosey parker" reference, this six month old article seems to positively luxuriate in the high altitude photography. As Google's Ed Parsons pithily points out, this is another case of "editorial integrity by the Daily Mail".
Meanwhile, digital mapping provider TomTom, who acquired Tele Atlas in 2008 has produced what's often described as a FUD piece (fear, uncertainty and doubt) on digital map data produced by OpenStreepMap. The article starts off well
"The concept of open source mapping is a very exciting one. As various technologies become more accessible, volunteer mappers can collect information and collaborate to produce shared maps. They’re cheap to make, licensing is often free or very low-cost, and users benefit from the knowledge of a large community of updaters."
So far, so good. OSM has been gaining a lot of traction and attention over recent months as Nestoria, Apple (for iPhoto on the iPad), Wikipedia and Foursquare all adopted OSM maps to power their spatial visualisations. But not, it's worth noting, to power turn-by-turn navigation applications. But according to TomTom, all is not well with this.
Despite the positives, recent studies have highlighted some major drawbacks of open source mapping, specifically with regard to safety, accuracy and reliability. In one particular instance, a leading open source map was compared against a professional TomTom map, and shown to have a third less residential road coverage and 16% less basic map attributes such as street names. Worse still, it blended pedestrian and car map geometry, and included 'a high number of fields and forest trails' classified as roads.
Interestingly, this view from TomTom clashes somewhat with a 2011 study comparing TomTom and OpenStreetMap in Germany which concluded that
"With a relative completeness comparison between the OSM database and TomTom's commercial dataset, we proved that OSM provides 27% more data within Germany with regard to the total street network and route information for pedestrians."
So why highlight the difference between OSM and TomTom data now? As TechDirt notes in its' commentary on this topic
"The fact that TomTom has chosen to highlight this current deficiency in OpenStreetMap shows two things. First, that it is watching the open source alternative very closely, and secondly, that it is sufficiently worried by what it sees to start sowing some FUD in people's minds. But as history has shown with both open source server software and open source encyclopaedias, once vendors of proprietary systems adopt such a tactic against up-and-coming free rivals, it's a clear sign that it's already too late to do anything about it, and that their days of undisputed dominance are numbered."
Whether that's a fair and accurate summary of this remains to be seen, but what this does prove it that just as I've been saying for the last two years that there is no one single authoriative source of Place data and there probably never will, so there is no one single authoriative map and likewise, there probably never will.
Without meaning to trivialise the adoption of OSM by Wikipedia, Foursquare et al, these maps are what might be termed map wallpaper; great for showing geographical and geospatial context for information. The high level of accuracy and internal data attributes needed to produce a turn-by-turn navigation system simply isn't needed here. Which makes TomTom's evaluation of OSM all the more puzzling.
It's a glaringly obvious oversight but a few month's back I realised that given what I do for a living, there's something missing from my blog and that something is a map.
There's a whole slew of "where am I" style WordPress plugins out there, but after some careful research I decided that none of them did precisely what I wanted, which was to show the last check-in I made on Foursquare, on a map, in the sidebar of my blog.
Those that did come close still didn't do the key thing I wanted and that was to use the map I work on as part of my day job. Now don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against the maps that I could have used; Google, Bing, Mapquest and OpenStreetMap produce very fine maps and they all have the JavaScript API I'd need to display my last checkin. But none of them used my map and that means a Nokia Map.
So taking what I'd learnt about WordPress plugins during the course of producing 12 versions of the WP Biographia plugin, I rolled up my sleeves (mentally and literally) and started work on what would become WP Quadratum. I seem to have a thing about naming my plugins using a Latin derivation of their name; I have no idea why, but it seems to be better than something along the lines of WP Yet Another Foursquare Checkin Plugin. But I digress.
Several months later, after wrestling with getting a plugin to authenticate with Foursquare via OAuth 2 and learning how to write not only a WordPress plugin but also a WordPress widget, WP Quadratum appeared on the sidebar on my blog. It's over there right now, towards the top right of your browser screen, unless your reading this on a mobile device, in which case you'll just have to take my word for it for now.
Now Nokia allows free and unauthenticated use of the JavaScript Maps API, but only up to a certain number of transactions over a lifetime. So I also built in support for supplying Nokia's Location API credentials as well. But then I stopped. Why build custom support for authentication and credentials into a plugin, only to probably have to copy-and-paste the code into another plugin I write that will use the same Maps API? So I digressed again and wrote another plugin, WP Nokia Auth, that handles the Nokia credentials for me, and then made WP Quadratum play nicely with WP Nokia Auth, if it's installed, active and configured.
It took a while, but v1.0 of both plugins are now up on the WordPress plugin repository and on GitHub as well, for the usual forking, downloading, hacking and poking around. Whether they get the same number of downloads as WP Biographia has (over 7,000 to date) I somewhat doubt, but unless I release these, I'll never know, so that's just what I've done.
And so, as Where 2012 draws to a close and the lobby of the Marriott Marquis in San Francisco fills with a slew of geo'd-out delegates waiting to check out, it's time for the traditional post conference retrospective writeup. If you were at Where this year or in previous years you'll probably want to skip ahead to the next paragraph, right now. Where, previously called Where 2.0, is one of the annual maps, geo, location conferences. Though it's very Californian and eye wateringly expensive, it's still the place to go to talk, listen and announce anything related to the nebulous industry we call Geo.
After skipping Where 2.0 last year, this year I returned as part of the Nokia contingent and found out that some things had changed.
Firstly, Where 2.0 was no more. O'Reilly have rebranded the conference as simply Where, with the strapline of the business of location. The conference had also moved from its traditional San Jose venue, via the soul desert that is the Santa Clara Convention centre last year, to a new home at the Marriott Marquis slap bang in the middle of downtown San Francisco.
Secondly, and probably more importantly, whilst Where was as slick and well put together as it's always been, something was missing. It's not easy to put my finger on what precisely was lacking. There seemed to be a lack of ... buzz, for want of a better word. It felt ... muted. Numbers were certainly down from previous years but that alone can't account for the feeling, or lack of it, this year. Granted, the venue was excellent, the food was as well too. The coffee was ... Starbucks. We can't have it all. The wifi almost held up. I met up with a lot of old friends and colleagues, including some from Yahoo! and the after show parties were edgy and the bar was open, free and copiously stocked.
But it did feel more Meh 2.0 (to be said out loud with an indifferent shrug of the shoulders) rather than Where 2.0, and from speaking to other people, I'm not alone in thinking this.
So enough introspection, to the point of this post, which is retrospection. Let's start with the high points.
This was most definitely a Nokia event. Not only were we Gold sponsors of the event but I was lucky enough to get a speaking slot, my second Where appearance, and I was amply aided and abetted by a geographically dispersed crowd of fellow Nokians hailing from not only The Valley, but Atlanta GA, Chicago IL and Berlin. As a bonus, I got to do not one, but two product launches, plus some sneak peeks at what's coming up location wise from the company.
Meh 2.0 notwithstanding, it was also good to see several Yahoo! alumni for a long overdue catchup. Geo-beers may have been conspicuous by their absence, but geo-cocktails were very much apparent.
Sadly, Yahoo! also provided probably the lowest point of the whole conference. Right slap bang in the middle of proceedings, Yahoo! announced yet another round of layoffs, culling almost 2000 employees. When this happens, the last place you want to be when you're waiting to hear whether you still have a job is at a conference and my heart just went out to my ex-colleagues who had to sit their, with a fixed smile on their face, as they waited to hear news from the Yahoo! mothership down in Sunnyvale.
So, to recap, a mixed bag of events and emotions at this year's Where. Personally and professionally I think it was a great, team aided, success. Hopefully we'll all return next year to find the "wow" at Where is back and to put the "meh" firmly behind us.
Wrapping this retrospective up, I should include the traditional slide deck from my talk, together with my notes. You'll find them below, hosted on Scribd this time as an embedded PDF. Since Slideshare went freemium, my decks are now just too big to be hosted by their free account offering which has a 10MB limit. At some point, I'll drag all my decks from Slideshare and put them up on Scribd.
[scribd id=100298958 key=key-23j0fhnk1syubpgvzv5n mode=list]
Slide 2
Good afternoon everyone. I'm Gary. I'm a geo-technologist by profession and a geographer at heart. I’m the Director of Places for Nokia’s Location and Commerce group.
Slide 3
But first some recent history. If you were here at last year’s Where, you would have heard Michael Halbherr, the head of Nokia’s Location & Commerce, introducing you to a concept … a truly global location platform, one that is built on the world’s most accurate mapping and navigation assets. If you were at Nokia World in London in October, you would have heard me talk about the launch of what we now call the Where Platform. Fast forward to today and I want to update you on how Nokia is continuing to deliver on the promise that Michael and I talked about in San Jose and in London … to grow the “Where” ecosystem, to provide a horizontal yet device agnostic set of API offering and a growing list of companies and apps that are using these APIs.
At Nokia Location & Commerce, our aim is to be the Where company. Why?
Today, the internet is well organised around the concepts of “What” and “Who” with search engines and social networks providing the answers to these questions. We are striving to provide answers to questions of “Where.”
Location is massively important to today’s internet, whether it’s on mobile devices, on tablets, on laptops or the other myriad ways in which we access the internet. Over 40% of mobile searches have location within them or are looking for local information. There’s a hunger for location-relevant information and this proves to us that the concept of “local” has never been more essential to today’s users, customers and consumers.
Slide 4
The days of someone owning a single internet connected device are almost over. We’re now buying, owning and using multiple mobile devices. At the same time, these devices are getting smarter – firstly, because they are increasingly connected to the cloud and secondly because they are sensor-rich. From NFC for payment in stores and on transport, to more advanced sensors that interpret if you’re running versus taking a bus, all the way to sensors that connect with devices like wrist band heart rate monitors – these sensor-rich devices provide us with critical data that helps us better understand location related behavior which in turn helps us to identify patterns and trends.
To build the Where Platform, we believe you need four essential components … data, a platform that uses this data, APIs that expose the platform and apps and experiences that showcase the power of the platform and its data.
Slide 5
So first, there’s data; we have a lot of data, from best-in-class, navigation quality, mapping assets through to global, yet local, location based data.
Slide 6
The Where Platform is built on top of this data and what’s more, it learns from the data. We call this a learning engine and it’s because there’s really two sorts of data out there … reference data and activity data.
Let’s start with a Place. Where and what is this Place? This is reference data, the index of world around us and it enables the routine location functions we take for granted, such as search, routing and navigation.
Then there’s activity data that utilizes the types of sensors I just spoke about to understand how people interact with their devices, their apps and the real world around them.
Or to put it another way, we know about a Place and we can know what actually happens, in the real world, at this Place. Put these two types of data together and it becomes what we call smart data and it’s this that powers the Where Platform and enable us to create a digital, predictive model from all the Places and objects in the physical world, including our user’s needs and activities.
Slide 7
The reference and activity data I mentioned earlier, combined as smart data, powers the Where Platform. The platform in turn powers the showcase for this, our apps, which I’ll cover in a few slides time. But apps aren’t enough in today’s world, you need robust APIs as well.
There is a unique opportunity to work with you and with developers to build the where-enabled ecosystem; across verticals and across the screens we use on a daily basis, to power the experiences you’re building for your users.
So let’s dig a bit deeper into the APIs …
Slide 8
We already have a set of modular, configurable, highly performant APIs that are easy to use and to integrate, with an active developer community who appreciate our simple and fair terms of use. For the web, we have JavaScript APIs for Maps and for Places as well as a new Places web service API, more of which in a few moments. We’re going to be unifying the JavaScript APIs for Maps and for Places into single API under the Nokia Maps for JavaScript API banner.
There’s also our Map Image web service API and our upcoming Maps API for HTML5, which I’ll talk more about in a few slide’s time.
And for native mobile use, there’s out Maps API for Qt and our Places API for JavaME and coming later this year our Maps API for Windows Phone.
Slide 9
APIs are of course utterly critical to the Where platform and the Where ecosystem but we also to ensure that we cover all the screens that act as touch-point between the digital and real words for people throughout their day. As I move from my computer at work, to my laptop, to my in-car nav system, to my tablet, our goal is to have an offering for virtually any of these screens.
In addition to the Places API, I also touched on APIs for Qt, for Windows Phone and for JavaME for Nokia devices. For non-Nokia handsets and platforms, you can already see the power of the NLP on maps.nokia.com on the web and coming soon will be native HTML5 support.
You may already know of the Nokia Maps app for Windows Phone, but Nokia Maps is already available via the Amazon Android Store and includes routing for drive, walk and public transport.
We’re also announcing a closed beta of our Nokia Maps HTML5 API, which is the first of many huge milestones we hope to achieve to expand our APIs and presence across screens as quickly as possible.
Slide 10
I mentioned a few slides back that we’re making a commitment to support the Where Platform across all screens, by making the platform device agnostic and truly horizontal. You may recognise the mobile devices behind me and, although these are screenshots of our maps on both Android and iOS, these are not mocks-ups, they’re from real proof of concepts, using the Where Platform. But these are not apps that we’re releasing so don’t rush to your mobiles to try and download them. But if you want to see them live, in action and in person, you’ll be able to see and play with them at the Nokia booth.
Slide 11
Now, a few slides back I mentioned our Places web service API. This is in addition to our Places API for JavaScript and so I’m really pleased, or as we say in Britain, chuffed, to announce the public beta of this …
Through our Places API you can: Discover Places by searching explicitly and nearby Display Place information, basic and extended data attributes, rich content, editorial and user generated content; this is far more than the offerings of some of our competitors Interact with a Place, share it, navigate to it
Through the Nokia Places API, you can find locations in more than 1.5 million areas (cities, districts, and regions) as well as more than 120 million point addresses across 15 countries.
Slide 12
The term Places API is usually synonymous with searching for Place information and with displaying a page containing this information, but there’s far more to Places that just this. Look at these heat maps behind me; they’re great examples of the type of experience you can create using the Nokia Places API. These dynamic heat maps are produced by combining Place categories and other algorithmic inputs to show were you might want to eat or shop. This is great for getting a feel for a locality that you may be unfamiliar with.
We know that a powerful set of API offerings is critical to our ability to recruit partners to help build the Where ecosystem. This is why I’m excited to share the launch of the Nokia Places API web service with you today.
Slide 13
At Nokia, we realize that becoming the Where company is not an easy task. The Platform alone is not enough, nor is produced a set of APIs enough. There needs to be support, documentation and tools which work the way you work. But we also know that sometimes you just want to join in the fun. And so, over the past year we have been working hard to grow the Where ecosystem.
We’ve added customers such as those listed here and these have increased the hits to the platform from 560M/month in Q1 2011 to 4.6B/month in Q1 of this year; that’s around a 750% increase.
Slide 14
For example, we have been working with Yahoo! since late 2010. All Yahoo! sites that have a map element will be served by one of Nokia’s Location & Commerce data center locations around the world.
Slide 15
Whenever one of millions of Yahoo! users checks out a location, Yahoo! sources its mapping/imagery, routing, traffic, and geocoding services from the Where Platform.
As Dirk Daumann (Nokia Head of Map Services Platform) says “We have served millions of Yahoo! users worldwide for around 150 days. Our service has been available to 99.9 per cent. This means that we have constantly exceeded what was agreed, something that we are very proud of. During peaks, we serve 1200 queries per second, a number that we estimate to grow when the transition of all Yahoo! sites to our services has been completed.”
Slide 16
Additionally, we recently announced our partnership with Groupon to collaborate on a redesign of the customer experience of deal discovery, purchase and redemption.
We plan to do this by working with them to offer market-leading, location-sensitive discounts and deals that are more locally relevant and convenient. By the way, as we’re early in our relationship with Groupon, the graphics you can see behind me are a mock-up, not a real app, so no heading to the Marketplace to download please.
Slide 17
What I’ve just been talking to you about over the last 15 minutes or so, shows, I hope, the massive amount of investment and commitment we’ve made over the past year to building a where-enabled ecosystem and in achieving our goal of becoming the Where company.
Similar to our Platform and APIs, we’ve met major milestones with our apps as well. Today, we have 5 apps that are based upon and showcase the Where Platform:
Nokia Drive provides free, in car navigation for driving and reaching destinations safely. Nokia Transport allows you to have all your commuter information at your fingertips: No more carrying around city maps or timetables—it is all on your device, wherever you are. Nokia Maps provides new ways to discover and explore the world around you. Nokia City Lens is an augmented reality browser turns a phone’s camera viewfinder into a new way to spot nearby attractions, shops, restaurants and places of interest. Nokia Pulse is an exciting new way to privately check in, meet up and stay in touch with the people, like family and close friends—with just one click.
In fact, these apps are one of the best ways to illustrate the power of the Where Platform. What we’ve done with our apps is just the beginning. And with the power of the platform and our APIs, the opportunities for you to build unique, location-relevant solutions are endless.
Slide 18
We see an opportunity to work with you to build a where-enabled ecosystem. For all of us to become part of something bigger. To be part of an ecosystem that stretches across screens. That spans B2C, B2B and B2D. That answers consumer’s where-related questions and empowers them to explore and enjoy the increasingly merged physical and digital world around them.
If you’re interested in discussing further how we can work together, please swing by the Nokia booth – it’s number 208.
Slide 19
… thank you for listening
Judging by comments to this blog post, on Twitter and on Google Plus, the consensus seems to be that yes, Apple is using OSM data from 2010 outside of the US; inside of the US it's (probably) TIGER data and no, there doesn't seem to be attribution and Apple may well be getting a communiqué from OSM to that effect. Other sources of information on this include * The iPhoto for iOS Not Using Google Maps thread on the OSM-Talk mailing list * Iván Sánchez Ortega has put up a nice map comparison between OSM and iPhoto's map tiles. * There's also another comparison between Apple's, OSM's and Google's map tiles. * Jonas. K has put up a blog post which comes right out and says that iPhoto is using OSM and other public domain mapping sources. * Finally, as a nice touch, this post seems to have made it into OSM Community Blogs.
... and now, back to the original post.
We live in a world dominated by and surrounded by brands. One of the hallmarks of a successful brand is whether it's able to be immediately recognised as that brand, without necessarily looking too deeply for a brand label. Look at a car and you'll probably be able to tell whether it's a Ford or not. Look at a laptop and you'll probably be able to tell whether it's Apple's or one of those faceless, grey, consumer models. Look at an espresso cup and you'll probably be able to tell whether it's got coffee from Illy in it.
As it is in the real, offline world, so it is in the digital, online world and nowhere is this more prevalent than in the world of digital maps. Each mapping provider has an immediately recognisable look, feel and style to it. You can tell whether the map is from Nokia or NAVTEQ, from Google, from Mapquest or from OpenStreetMap. Now granted, a digital map is the product of lots of data sources but the map's style is unique; although OpenStreetMap's style is almost the exception as there's several styles you can use.
Ever since the launch of the original iPhone, for Apple that look and feel of their maps have been Google's. Even before you look to the bottom right hand corner of the map and see the Google logo you'll know it's a Google map. There's also been lots of rumours that with Apple's acquisitions in the mapping space, C3 and Placebase to name but a few, it wouldn't be too long before Apple had their own map.
Maybe that time has now come, for iPhoto on iOS at least. Take a look at the screen grabs above. These maps aren't, at least at face value, Google's. The map style isn't Google's and even more interestingly, there's no immediately apparent copyright or brand notice anywhere on the map. Is this Apple's new map or is it another map provider's under a license that doesn't need branding?
Thanks must go to follow Nokian Andrea Trasatti for spotting this on MacRumors; there's also commentary on this over at 512 Pixels as well. Photo Credits courtesy of MacRumors.
In web and location circles, much has been made of Foursquare's recent "little announcement" of the location based, check-in, company's decision to oust Google Maps and instead to go with OpenStreetMap data, by way of MapBox.
From reading a lot of the coverage you'd be forgiven for thinking that Foursquare has completely severed ties with Google's mapping APIs, but this isn't quite the story. As ReadWriteWeb notes in the last paragraph of its coverage, "Foursquare's iPhone and Android apps won't be affected" as the move is for Foursquare's home on the web, foursquare.com, only.
Indeed, the current set of Foursquare smartphone apps continue to use a variety of mapping platforms. On Android and on iOS, it's still Google Maps, not unsurprisingly given Android is effectively a Google mobile OS, and Google is still Apple's mapping platform of choice, for now at least.
On Blackberry it's also business as usual for Google Maps, whilst on Symbian, it's Nokia's mapping platform and on Windows Phone 7 it's (currently) the Bing mapping platform.
So while this move is great news for both the OpenStreetMap community and for MapBox and, as ReadWriteWeb notes, "when you use Foursquare Explore on the Web to search for places, you'll be taking eyeballs away from Google", this is a move that affects Foursquare's web presence only, not their mobile apps. Given that in order to actually use Foursquare effectively, in other words, to check-in, you need to be on a smartphone, I wonder how many eyeballs will actually be taken away from Google. Furthermore, whilst those in the location industry are looking at this keenly, I have to wonder how many users of Foursquare will actually notice the change on the web.
For Foursquare on the web this is probably a smart move and for most users of the Foursquare website, OpenStreetMap data is, as Muki Haklay noted in a paper published in 20101, "good enough".
But not good enough apparently for some Foursquare users, who are fairly outspoken about blank or incomplete maps on the comments to Foursquare's announcement blog post.
It would be good to think that Foursquare's use of OpenStreetMap data will encourage their users to contribute to the underlying open spatial data set that is OSM; after all, all you really need is a GPS device, which is what most smartphones are these days. The optimist in me hopes that this will be the case. The pessimist in me, or maybe it's the realist in me, tempers that hope with the realisation that Foursquare still makes the address of a new Place optional, that a geocode from a GPS device probably isn't enough and that most Foursquare users neither know or care about the underlying map, caring far more about getting to the top of the leaderboard, becoming Mayor and earning badges.
Time alone will tell whether my optimistic side is right.
In May of this year, Nokia announced the retirement of the Ovi brand and the observant map watchers amongst you may have noticed that pointing your browser of choice at maps.ovi.com now automagically redirects you to the new, shiny maps.nokia.com.
What you may not have noticed is that Nokia maps doesn't just work on your desktop or laptop web browser or on Nokia smartphones, as Electric Pig nicely pointed out, Nokia has invaded the iPhone too. Point your iPhone or iPad at the Nokia Maps for Mobile Web at m.maps.nokia.com and you'll see something like this ...
... a fully featured version of Nokia Maps that does search, satellite views, GPS and location fixes, navigation, even public transport and, of course ...
... places. And it's not just iOS devices that the new Mobile Web maps supports, Android users can have this too as can Blackberry users.
That's not just geo-tastic, it's geo-egalitarian.
Yahoo's JavaScript and AJAX API was the first mapping API I ever used and it now seems hard to remember when Yahoo's API offerings were the dominant player, always iterating and innovating. The Yahoo! API set formed and continued to underpin the majority of my online presence. When I wrote about leaving Yahoo! and joining Nokia in May of 2010 I said ...
So whilst I’m going to Nokia, I’ll continue to use my core set of Yahoo! products, tools and APIs … YQL, Placemaker, GeoPlanet, WOEIDs, YUI, Flickr and Delicious. Not because I used to work for Yahoo! but because they’re superb products.
... and I meant every word of it. The Yahoo! APIs were stable, powerful and let create web experiences quickly and easily. But now a year later a lot has changed. I still use Flickr on a pretty much daily basis, but Delicious is no longer a Yahoo! property and I transitioned my other web presence from using YQL for RSS feed aggregation to use SimplePie as YQL was frequently down or just not working. The original core set of Yahoo! APIs I use in anger is now just down to Flickr and YUI.
Sadly, this trend is continuing and on September 13th, to badly mangle the quote from Cypher in The Matrix, "buckle up your seatbelts Map scripters, 'cause the Yahoo! Maps API is going bye-bye" and writing ...
var map = new YMap(document.getElementById('map'));
... will be a thing of the past. Adam Duvander, author of the excellent Map Scripting 101, has written a eulogy for the Yahoo! Maps API over on Programmable Web, including some pithy quotes from old friend Tyler Bell, whom I worked with when I was part of the Yahoo! Geo Technologies group, which sadly echo my comments on the overall demise of Geo at the company.
Thankfully all is not doom and gloom in the world of mapping APIs and Nokia's Maps API is firmly in the spotlight to take up the slack left by the addition of the Yahoo! Maps API to the deadpool. And if you're using Mapstraction with the Yahoo! Maps API, it should be relatively trivial to swap your code over to the Nokia API as Mapstraction now supports Nokia Maps. I may have had a hand in that.
Often maligned and ignored, sometimes science fiction writers are bang on the mark. The cognoscenti of the high brow literary world often dismiss science fiction as being not proper writing or even worthy of the label of literature. But sci-fi authors are often as not as uniquely placed to think about today's technology as they are to extrapolate on tomorrow's.
Recently, Charles Stross, one of my favourite sci-fi authors, gave a keynote at USENIX 2011 on Network Security In The Medium Term, 2061 To 2561. Not the most obvious of keynote titles to talk about maps or magic. But as part of his keynote, which is well worth reading in its entirety, he talked about how far technology has come in just the last 50 years and where it might go before the next 50 ...
... we’re currently raising the first generation of kids who won’t know what it means to be lost – everywhere they go, they have GPS service and a moving map that will helpfully show them how to get wherever they want to go. It’s not hard to envisage an app that goes a step beyond Google Maps on your smartphone, whereby it not only shows you how to get from point A to point B, but it can book transport to get you there – by taxi, ride-share, or plane – within your budgetary and other constraints. That’s not even far-fetched: it’s just what you get when you tie the mutant offspring of Hipmunk or Kayak into Google, and add Paypal ... it’s magic: you have a little glowing box, and if you tell it “I want to visit my cousin Bill, wherever he is,” a taxi will pull up and take you to Bill’s house (if he lives nearby), or a Greyhound bus station, or the airport. (Better hope he’s not visiting Nepal; that could be expensive.)
In today's full on rush to monetize, to not get caught up in a patent suit and to either spot or be the next big thing, it's easy to lose sight of just how magical the technology we take for granted is.
Consider, just for a moment, how much computing power and connectivity today's sensor packed smartphones have in them. As I've mentioned before, just one of my phones has more CPU power, more storage and more connectivity options than the first computer I ever used as part of my day job, with the added bonus that it fits in my pocket and doesn't require it's own dedicated power supply and air conditioned room, which would restrict mobility somewhat.
Add to all of that that I'm writing this post using the Blogsy app on my iPad while on holiday in Spain, which is connected to a web server somewhere in the United States (I've no real idea where) over a data connection running via one of my phones which is also acting as a mobile wifi hotspot and which also tells me the GPS coordinates, accurate to 4 metres, of where I am and which appear in the sort of geotag I put at the end of my posts.
When I was in my (much) younger years, I grew up with 3 terrestrial TV channels, no PC's, mobile phones or web sites and when London still had an 01 dialling code and so, from where I'm sitting, there's something distinctly magical about all of this and its oh so easy to lose sight of that.
Unless of course, you're one of the generation who grew up with on demand movies, smartphones, bazillions of TV channels, chatting with your friends on Facebook and with GPS in your phone and can't really see what the fuss is all about; in which case, just indulge me when I say that today's technology is magical and tomorrow's probably will be for you too.
In a way, this was all Matt Whatsit's fault; he writes very profane and very funny blog posts and reading his recent The Five Stages Of P****d Wife (which you should read if you haven't already, err, read it) made me laugh, hell, it made me ROFL and LMAO at the same time but it also made me think, though not necessarily about wives or drunkenness ...
Now background reading and general swotting up on a topic is all very well but to really learn how to do something you just have to roll your sleeves up and do it yourself. Though it's probably stretching a comparison too far, you don't learn to drive a car through reading the highway code; you actually get behind the wheel (preferably under supervision) and ... drive. You don't learn about what food tastes good from a recipe book; you ... taste the stuff yourself.
And so it is with writing code and using new and unfamiliar APIs. It was definitely the case with my recent (reacquaintance of, and) foray into JavaScript and the addition of support for Nokia's Ovi Maps API to the Mapstraction project, with the added benefit of having to teach myself how to move from my (by now very dated) knowledge of version and revision control under CVS to git.
So, first JavaScript and Mapstraction and the Nokia Maps API and now to PHP and the WordPress API. There's a lot of WordPress plugins that do geo-related stuff with your blog but none of them actually do what I want. WP Geo comes close, but it uses Google Maps and Google Maps only. Now I have nothing against Google Maps or the Google Maps APIs but I want maps from the company I work for on my blog.
When I came to add Nokia's Maps API to Mapstraction I at least had a head start. I'd done some JavaScript and I was at least familiar with the Mapstraction API. But writing a WordPress plugin was another thing entirely. Despite hosting my blog on WordPress since 2004 and being able to hack a moderate amount of PHP, I'd never needed to use the WordPress API. Until now.
Bearing in mind the old adage about walking before you can run I decided the best way to tackle this was to write a WordPress plugin for something much more simplistic and this is where Matt Whatsit comes in. At the foot of each post is a nice little biography; in Matt's case it read "Stole some Chewits in 1979. The guilt still haunts me".
So I searched for a plugin that would give me this capability. There's lots. But as with the desire for a geo-related plugin, none of them did exactly what I wanted. The closest I could find was Jon Bishop's WP About Author plugin. So, as all WordPress plugins are licensed under the version 2 of the GNU Public License, I took Jon's plugin and hacked it to do what I wanted it to do. The result is what I've called WP Biographia and you should be able to see the results of it at the foot of this post, if you're reading it from this URL.
I now know, or at least understand at a conceptual level with much web searching of the WordPress Codex, how to write and structure a WordPress plugin. I still need to know how to write and structure a WordPress widget but that will form part of the next version of WP Biographia. By then, I should be armed with enough WordPress API knowledge to start to write what I really wanted to write, which is my geo-related plugin, which may, or may not be called WP Mappa. I'm only a quarter of the way there, but it's a quarter more than when I started this.
In the meantime, WP Biographia is now part of the official WordPress plugin repository and is also up on github as well. It also now has a resident page here on my blog which I'll update as and when I make sufficient changes and improvements to warrant a new version.
Starting to code again is addictive and I seem to have managed to rack up a few github repositories of recent. WP Biographia is but one of what I've christened, in line with the theme of Gary's Bloggage, Gary's Codeage. For now, it's a holding pen for those code projects that live in github but for which I've yet to write a formal page on. These may appear sometime in the not too distant future as and when time permits.
Photo Credits: ficek1618 on Flickr.
It's been a while since my last blog post; my day job at Nokia has been taking up almost all of my time and what little time has been left has been spent with my family. But in between day job and family time there's evenings spent in a hotel room and hours spent on a plane, mainly between London's Heathrow and Berlin's Tegel airports. It's in these periods of time that a combination of my MacBook Pro, running a combo of Apache/MySQL/PHP with MAMP and TextMate has allowed me to rediscover the pleasure of what I used to do for my day job before Yahoo! and before Nokia ... and that's to write code.
As a fully unreconstructed maps nerd, I love the variety and richness of the mapping APIs available on today's internet. One of the best books on how to use these mapping APIs is the "does just what it says on the label" Map Scripting 101 by Adam DuVander. While the book touches on the power of the APIs from Google, from Yahoo, and from Bing (amongst others) its main focus in on Mapstraction, the JavaScript mapping abstraction library.
As the name suggest, Mapstraction abstracts, or wraps, the differences between the variety of approaches that each JavaScript mapping API uses into a single consistent interface. With Mapstraction, the API methods to create a map, to change the zoom level, to centre the map, to add a marker or push pin to the map are the same, regardless of which underlying mapping API you use.
Mapstraction allowed you to use the mapping APIs from Google, Yahoo, Bing, Cloudmade, GeoCommons, Cartocuidad, Yandex and MapQuest. But not Nokia's Ovi Maps API, which was released in February 2011. This is where my local Apache installation, TextMate and the aforementioned hotel room and flight time comes back into the story. Cue a frantic crash course to reacquaint myself with JavaScript, some trial and error, some swearing and some background reading to convert my slightly outdated knowledge of CVS into how to use git and Mapstraction now supports the Ovi Maps API. No, really. It's on github right now.
There's a demo of some of the major features of both Mapstraction and the Ovi Maps API over at maps.vicchi.org and, in the spirit of social coding, the source for that is on github as well.
I'm not suggesting for one moment that if the current geo day job falls through I can happily pick up a replacement role coding JavaScript, or coding anything for that matter, but it's oddly reassuring that I still have the vague ability to continue the profession of coding software that earnt me a living for almost 25 years.
Photo Credits: Infidelic on Flickr.
The first computer I used at work was powerful for its day (though pitifully underpowered compared to the phone that's sitting in my pocket at the moment) but was somewhat unfriendly by today's standards. You sat down at a terminal (not a PC, they hadn't been invented) and were presented with a command line prompt that said "Username:", pass that barrier to entry and it said "Password:". Armed with the right combination of username and password you would be rewarded with a flashing cursor preceded by a dollar sign as a prompt ... $. If you wanted help you couldn't browse the web (it hadn't been invented) nor ask in a mailing list (the Internet was in its early days and you probably didn't have access). Instead you consulted the big, heavy, ring bound, bright orange documentation set; these were the heady days of DEC and VAX/VMS.
The computer I'm writing this on still needs a username and password but is easy to use, graphical, intuitive and comes with multiple web sites, discussion and documentation sites and mailing lists to ask questions in. But to get the most of today's computers you still need a book sometimes, which is why David Pogue's Mac OS X: The Missing Manual is still one of the most well thumbed books I have, 8 years and multiple editions later. There's a version for Windows too.
So what does this have to do with OpenStreetMap? Bear with me ... there are parallels to be drawn.
OpenStreetMap is easy to use, graphical (on the website), comes with multiple discussion and documentation sites and well supported mailing lists; you can always find the answer to your question. But sometimes you don't know what the question is. Sometimes you just want to read a book.
OpenStreetMap: Using and Enhancing The Free Map Of The World is that book ... consider it the Missing Manual if you will.
Originally written in German by mailing list stalwarts Frederik Ramm and Jochen Topf in 2008 (names which will be familiar to anyone who's spent any time on the OSM mailing lists), the book was translated into English with Steve Chilton (chair of the UK's Society of Cartographers) towards the end of 2010. A translation would be impressive enough but the English version also comes with expanded sections and all of the content, examples and illustrations have been revisited, revised and updated.
Whether you're an OSM expert or you just want to see how one of the largest voluntary, crowd sourced projects on the face of the Internet works this is a worthy and valuable addition to your bookshelf. While no OSM expert I considered myself fairly well versed in how to use OpenStreetMap. Reading the book was a salient lesson on just how much I didn't know; the section on GPS was an education in itself.
The book also provides a well written and easy to understand explanation of what you can and what you can't do with OSM's wealth of geographic data and answers so many of the questions on data licensing that crop up again and again in conversations around OSM and on the mailing lists.
As a written work, the OpenStreetMap book works on multiple levels. You can dip into it, select the parts that interest you, get distracted by reading about stuff you didn't think you'd want to know or you can read it from cover to cover.
One final thought; the old adage about the Internet being an information hose pipe holds true where OpenStreetMap is concerned. The volume of information and data is simply staggering. You can find your way through all of this information by yourself. Or you can just read a well written, well thought out book instead. Even in today's online world there's still a place for the feeling you get from holding a book in your hands and leafing back and forwards through the pages. My copy of this book is still reasonably pristine, despite being hauled on and off planes and read from cover to cover. I can't guarantee it'll stay that way for long.
Apart from being a damn fine Trance album, German DJ Paul Van Dyk's The Politics of Dancing would definitely make my top 5 list of album titles, if I had one. I love the way the two normally diametrically opposed ideas of politics and dancing are used together to make something new.
Here's another example which is much more geo related; the geography of talking.
A group of researchers have redrawn the map of Great Britain using human interactions, in this case people talking to each other on the telephone, to show how little the way in which we communicate and the relationships we have bear any resemblance to the formal boundaries that governments draw on a map. In the map below, the total amount of talk time is shown, with the maps areas being more opaque the more calls and interactions are made.
Another view of the data is revealed when the concentration of calls made are plotted against the UK Government's regional boundaries, which apart from any other insights, shows just how many people live in London and its environs and how much of a chatterbox we all are.
Sometimes I read arguments against using a map for visualising data, usually prefixed by words to the effect of "just because you can put something on a map". Sometimes those arguments are justified, but sometimes the map remains the best way to view data and to draw insights from that data. Regardless of which point of view you subscribe to, I always like maps that allow you to look at the world in a different way.
You can read the full text of the research article at PLoS one; Redrawing the Map of Great Britain from a Network of Human Interactions - Ratti, Sobolevsky, Calabrese, Andris, Reades, Martino, Claxton and Strogatz.
To be filed under the "slightly self promoting" department, earlier this year I was invited to speak at the Society of Cartographers Summer School in Manchester, UK. It's always great to be invited to speak at a conference but I was particularly excited by the SoC. The geo world I inhabit is one of data, APIs, platforms and data mining and aggregation techniques. Sometimes the map gets lost in all of this. So it was an honour to speak at an event where it was all about the map. The Summer School was written up in November's edition of the SoC Newsletter which is only available to society members, but with permission I've reproduced below the sections of the newsletter which cover my involvement.
Inspired by London Transport maps, various historical maps and his son, Gary has been involved with maps and mapping for many years. His entertaining, informative and well-illustrated lecture took delegates on a short trip along the route taken by location-based communications from smoke signals, pigeons, the compass, maps such as the Mappa Mundi, radio signals and triangulation through to today’s maps as seen in smart phone with GPS-based mobile devices. He then turned his attention to data, silos of data and the “geo-industry” where the map doesn’t seem to be important any more; it’s all about the data and the map is often strangely absent.
Gary then took delegates on another trip, this time into the dark world of ‘Geo-Babel’, where we have data, lots of data, wide and varied, some commercial (Navteq and Teleatlas), some authoritative (Britain’s Ordnance Survey) and some of it crowd- sourced and growing aggressively (OpenStreetMap), some from unlikely sources (Flickr) and some from location-based social networking services (Foursquare and Gowalla). All this data, often available and free, a cartographer’s dream, but wait, Gary explains that there is now a darker side to data. Much of this ‘free’ data appears to be locked in its own private little data silos, ironically at a time when previously proprietary data becomes unlocked and open (Ordnance Survey), crowd-sourced data becomes locked behind a well meaning but restrictive license, the question is posed to delegates, how can we, as part of the geo-industry, dig ourselves out of this hole? Mike Shand
The last session of the conference was setup as a panel discussion, with the theme of “All this data is good, but what about the cartography?” In order to start the ball rolling the preceding presentation was by Gary Gale (Nokia/Ovi Maps). His grandly entitled presentation - Welcome to the world of the geo data silo; where closed data is open and open data is closed - certainly resonated with me, particularly “the four horsemen of the geopocalypse”. Gary sat aside to allow his fellow panelists a short rant-space each. Richard Fairhurst concentrated on his vision of carto-goodness. He made an interesting analogy between industrial carto (Google), Boing Boing carto (retro 8-bit games style map) and Artisan carto (cartography with care). For a laugh (I presume!) he proposed a figurehead for web cartography and then flipped up a slide with three figureheads - Jobs, Gates and Chilton. He was followed by Bob Barr with a wider view of maps and quality. I then tried to propose some questions to the panel (eg: you have shown examples of good/bad design - but what are you exactly looking for when you are making those choices?) - and then opened it up for audience participation and questions/comments. We really should have recorded this session as there was a wide- range of points made, few of which I can now recall! You really needed to be there to get the full impact of the panelists’ views and the lively discussion that ensued. Steve Chilton SoC Chair
When I last wrote about my theory of GeoBabel I seem to recall saying I was retiring it. That's still true but seeing as I didn't actually write the newsletter my geoconscience is clear on this point.
There's a saying in French which goes "plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" which translates as the more things change, the more they stay the same. Maybe the same could be said to apply to today's World Wide Web ... "plus les changements web, plus le web reste le même", the more the Web changes, the more the Web stays the same, with blame firmly put at Google Translate if this doesn't translate properly.
Take a look at this screen-shot of Tim Berners-Lee's original World Wide Web browser, circa 1990, running on a NeXT system for an illustration of what I mean.
While Berners-Lee's original vision of the Web browser as an editor, with the web as as collaborative and interactive medium didn't survive per se, the basic principle survives in the form of today's blogs and wikis. While NeXT folded as a hardware company in 1993, NeXT's NeXTstep and OpenStep development environments survive today under the hood of Apple's OS X operating system ... and the principle of overlapping windows, icons and menus are immediately familiar from today's graphical computing environments.
But for me, perhaps the nicest and most familiar part of the screen-shot is the Web mapping example, showing CERN's location in Geneva. Even at the birth of the Web, maps were important and are still the most immediate and widely spread use of geographical data visualisation we have today. With the pace of today's technological progress, who knows how the Web will appear 20 years hence, but I'd be willing to hazard a bet that despite recent protestations over the death of the map, maps will be as integral a part of the Web experience as it was back when the Web was born.
The popular press and media likes nothing better to poke fun at people who seem to ignore their own senses and instead rely on their GPS sat-nav systems, which frequently results in people ending up in the middle of fields, in the middle of rivers or even, in extreme cases, almost driving off of the edge of a cliff.
But the strangest example of this sort of behaviour was in the first reports of recent events on the border of Costa Rica and Nicaragua that seemed to implicate Google Maps as justification for Nicaraguan troops crossing the border into Costa Rica and raising the Nicaraguan flag on Costa Rican territory. The dispute seems to hark back to the 1850's where the contested border between the two countries followed the course of the San Juan River, the course of which has since moved somewhat, as rivers are wont to do. Costa Rica asserts their sovereignty on the disputed land based on the 1850's arbitrated border which follows the course of the river and Nicaragua asserts theirs based on the fact that the river has moved so some land must be theirs.
The reference to Google Maps turns out to be a bit of a red herring as well, originating from an opportunistic sound bite rather than fact. Granted Google have based their data set on admittedly sparse data, some of it originating from the US State Department, which had got it wrong. But other mapping data vendors, who should know better and who at the time were having a great laugh at Google's expense on various forms of social media, turn out to be just as incorrect as Google's.
While this is probably the most extreme example of "but I found it on the internet so it must be true", the whole story is less about whose map is right, less about blaming map error on an online map and more about how some parts of the world are less well mapped than others. Not all map data is created equal.
The twists and turns of the story are best followed on the original post from Jonathan Crowe's excellent The Map Room blog and its follow up as well as an in-depth article on the subject from Ogle Earth.
Like most cities these days, there's a lot of graffiti in Berlin. Some of it is just the mindless repetitive tagging where someone feels the need to display his or her tag over as much surface area as possible. But some of it aspires to art, especially the large displays found on the sides of buildings and high up on walls. A great example of this is the massive question (or maybe it's a statement) of How Long Is Now, found on the side of the Tacheles on Oranienburgerstraße, complete with a giant cockroach emerging from the wall.
This grand painting style, part graffiti, part mural, part art seems to be iconic to a lot of the Mitte area of what used to be East Berlin. With this in mind, it's good to see that Nokia has decided to join in with this peculiarly Berlin trait with its own contribution, telling visitors walking along Invalidenstraße towards Nordbahnhof precisely what goes on in the Nokia Gate5 offices ... Ovi Maps, made here.
Exposure 2010, the recent study by Orange and TNS, makes for some interesting reading for the location industry. Although it should be taken with a large pinch of salt from the pot labelled lies, damned lies and statistics, the study's report shows the significant increase in use of geolocation services within the mobile space.
In the UK, France, Spain and Poland, geolocation services occupy the 3rd, 2nd, 1st and 2nd slots respectively for most used mobile services. While the report only breaks geolocation down into two categories, streetmap/GPS and social networks, it's not difficult to see how the perception that location is finally going mainstream is worth some merit.
It would have been nice to see a deeper breakdown by mapping service and social network but, in Europe at least, location and place seem to be making significant strides towards ubiquity.
Coverage of the report is available in a variety of places online including the EIN presswire as well as an overview of the study from Orange UK.
Photo Credits: Marc Levin on Flickr.
With GeoBabel firmly put to rest, I was looking for inspiration when Andrew Larcombe asked me back to the British Computer Society's Geospatial Specialist Group to speak. After a week of drawing a blank, with Andrew sending gentle messages of encouragement via Twitter Direct Message (OI - GALE. TITLE. NOW!!) inspiration finally arrived from a variety of sources. Firstly there was Mashable's History of Location Technology infographic. Then there the brief history of location slides I'd used in a few of my previous talks. There was the rather fine 3D visualisation of geolocation history that Chris Osborne used at W3G and at GeoCom 2010. And then there were two questions that kept cropping up when speaking to people at conferences ... "this location stuff's only recent isn't it?" and "I can't keep up with this geo stuff, it's all moving too fast, where's it going?".
So I started to research this. I knew that location had a long history but I was taken aback to find out just how long that history was. I'd tended to think of the human race using longitude and latitude to work out their location sometime in the 1700's, about the same time as the race to make a working, reliable marine chronometer. It came as a bit of a shock to find out that longitude and latitude were first proposed in 300 BC and were first used to locate a position on the surface of the Earth in 200 BC. Focussing on use of location, on location sharing and on LBS/LBMS and putting GIS to one side I came up with A (Mostly) Complete & (Mostly) Accurate History Of Location (Abridged).
The first 15 of my slides takes the story of location from 3200 BC, with the first use of celestial navigation to 1960, with the launch of the first navigation satellites. That's not the first GPS satellites, they didn't come along until 1969.
And then things really start to accelerate with the headlong rush to the internet, to smart phones, to PNDs (Personal Navigation Devices), to online maps on phones, to LBMS (Location Based Mobile Services) to attempts to own the "Place space" from Facebook, Foursquare and Gowalla.
I finished my talk with an illustration of how services are frantically adding "check-in" facilties and how the early adoptors in the location sharing and check-in space aren't necessarily the leaders now, some 4 years after they were first launched. 4 years is an awfully long time in technology and an awfully large amount has been launched, been shuttered, succeeded and failed over that time.
Post talk, a lively and pointed Q&A session ensued and I was asked to make some predictions for the location space in the coming year. As I've written about before, predictions are notoriously hard to make and even harder to make them correctly. Having said that, I can't believe that check-ins are the nadir of the location space. The more services that add them, the more time it takes for the end-user to get a relevant experience ... check-in fatigue. The end goal has to be increasing relevance in your online and mobile experience and that has to mean less fragmented apps (more GeoBabel) and more integration of location as a feature and not a business in itself.
Finally, an hour and a half after we'd started, the talk and the Q&A was over; there's only one thing you can really do after that and that's head out into Covent Garden in search of geo-beers and a geo-curry. Which is just what happened.
Not content with pointing out the fun you can have with tracking your location, xkcd, the webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language has branched out into making maps. The updated map of online communities shows the volume of daily social activity across all of the online world, and not just the high profile ones that get the press coverage.
Click through for the full size versions and loose yourself in the plains of awkward public family interactions, the Bay Of Flames and other geographical wonders.
Yanko Tsvetkov, visual artist, graphic designer and illustrator, has been at it again producing more mapping madness and cartographical curiosities. The man behind the map of Europe according to the Hungarians has produced another crop of somewhat subjective maps of Europe, where the United Kingdom comes under the headings of The Union Of Subsidized Farmers (Where I Live), Mummy (according to the USA), Slayers Of Virgins (according to France) and Enigma Code Hackers (according to Germany). Apparently.
Here's a couple of examples; Europe According To The USA ...
... and Europe According To The French.
Head over to his mapping stereotypes project page for the rest. It's mapping, but not as we know it, and as Yanko aptly puts it, "a sense of humour is highly recommended".
I'm currently at the Location Business Summit USA in the Crowne Plaza Hotel in San Jose, California where yesterday I gave a talk on "Of Data Silos, Geo-Babel and Other Geo Malaises". More about that in a later post, but one of the points I raised seemed to strike a chord with the audience ... in 2010, where's the map?
In spite of today's joyous rush to location based services and location based mobile services, the map seems to take a back seat, if it's even present at all. This point was taken up again on one of the opening panels with one of the panelists commenting that "many services don't use maps as an interface".
But there are times when the map is precisely the interface you want to use, especially when you're trying to visualize the impact of a data set on a location and serendipitously my morning trawl of my RSS feeds provided two examples of where the map is and just how effective it can be.
Firstly there's Vacant NYC, a crowd-sourced data set of vacant buildings, lots and condominiums in New York. The underlying data set is rich and complex but a simple, map based visualization, provides an immediate view onto the data, as can be seen from the screen-shot below.
Closer to home, there's the London Murder Map, which whilst potentially ghoulish, again effectively shows how, and more importantly where, people have lost their lives in the UK's capital. As with the New York example, the data set is rich, as shown by the colour coded key above the map, but the map takes centre stage and yields an immediate overview of London, with the option to dig down deeper into the data and into the map.
In 2010, the map may be strangely absent from a lot of today's location based and themed services but it's good to see that the map is very much alive, well and serving a purpose.
I should start off by saying that I don't mean mapping web sites. There's no Ovi, Yahoo!, Google or OpenStreetMap web sites in this post. No, this is a blog post about Eddie Izzard (at least slightly), Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle (even more ephmerally), the (death of) RSS, maps and cartography (generally) and (in the main) web sites about maps and cartography.
A strange set of bedfellows you might think (you might also think I've been overdosing on LISP as there's way way too many parentheses in the first two paragraphs alone) ... but bear with me.
Eddie Izzard, in his Dress To Kill stage show ("cake or death"), was musing on the way in which people perceive history and this got me to thinking about RSS. But first, this is what he said ...
Yes, and I grew up in Europe, where the history comes from. Oh, yeah. You tear your history down, man! “30 years old, let's smash it to the floor and put a car park here!" I have seen it in stories. I saw something in a program on something in Miami, and they were saying, "We've redecorated this building to how it looked over 50 years ago!" And people were going, "No, surely not, no. No one was alive then!"
And the RSS connection? Well in 2005 ZDNet were predicting the death of RSS by way of the death of the RSS reader, and then last year TechCrunch composed an epitaph for Really Simple Syndication saying "Rest in peace RSS. It's time to completely cut RSS off and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn't cut it anymore".
Yet for me at least RSS is very much alive, well and part of my daily routine of news and information gathering and acquisition (which includes Twitter, but it's by no way the sole source). Sorry, went back to parentheses there; I'll try to curb this.
And under my RSS group that contains feeds from sites I've noticed and want to read again (yes I could have bookmarked them but my RSS reader, still alive and well in the form of NetNewsWire, aggregates them for me in a way that I find works) and it struck me the other day that there's a hell of a lot of maps and cartography sites alive and well.
So to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle? That can be summed up neatly by saying that the observer affects the observed. So is this part of a renaissance of interest in mapping and cartography in general or are there more mapping and cartography sites out there because we're looking for them and people are responding to a perceived need? With this in mind, here's a list of sites you should probably read at least once because they show just how much variety and interest there is on the topic of maps out there on the web.
Strange Maps - If you read one maps blog, read this one. It never ceases to inform, amaze, amuse or any combination of the three.
Mapperz - The Mapping News Blog - Regularly updated roundup of what's new in the world of maps and GIS.
The Map Room - Jonathan Crowe's Weblog About Maps - Links and articles on maps, map collections, map related resources and anything much map related on the web.
Fuckyesmaps - A boy and a girl with a love for maps. Need I say more?
Fuck Yeah Cartography - More cartographical profanity but basically anything that explores interesting representations of space.
Cartophile - Whoever the anonymous author of this Tumblr powered blog is, one things for sure and that's that they love anything maps and cartography related.
Cartastrophe - What happens when maps go bad.
Atlas Obscura - Curious and Wonderful Travel Destinations, A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities and Esoterica - Not strictly maps related but an online atlas of the weird and wonderful that's around the world. Punch in your home city or area and be amazed.
Know of any more that should be in my (not dead yet) RSS feed? The comments would be a good place to let me know, you know. Photo Credits: pixn8tr and Justin Masterson on Flickr.
Two weeks into the Nokia and Ovi experience and I can finally pause and catch my breath. It's been an intense two weeks and asking me what my impressions are of Nokia are akin to putting someone at the top of a very large, very steep and very fast roller coaster, watching them plummet down and then, before they're even out of their seat, asking them to comment on what the scenery was like. So I won't even try to comment on the scenery and will instead merely record the four things that have stuck in my mind.
I've been busy. I've been very busy. I've also been at home for all of two days in the last two weeks and whilst video chatting with my family over Skype is better than a plain old fashioned voice call it's no substitute for being at home more; but things will settle down into a more manageable routine over the coming weeks. Being busy has meant that I've kept my head down and tried to assimilate all the new information with which I'm being bombarded, a fact that's not gone unnoticed by Chris Osborne ... "severe drop off in @vicchi's bloggage and tweetage levels, means that maybe, just maybe, he is actually doing some work these days". Quite.
I learnt today that Ovi is Finnish for door, proving for once the adage that you learn something new every day.
At Yahoo! we used to talk about eating our own dog food a lot; thankfully meaning that a company should use the products that it makes rather than that the employees develop a predilection for Pedigree Chum. Although it took me the best part of the first week to notice, Nokia certainly eats its own dog food; apart from the ever present starfish style conferencing phones in meeting rooms, there's no desk phones at all. None. But everyone has a mobile, and uses them a lot, either over the cellular network or hooked up to the internal VOIP system through the office wifi. Actually everyone seems to have more than one mobile handset, two, three and even four handsets doesn't seem to be unusual.
In a previous role I seemed to spend a lot of my time talking about why location and all of the many geo facets it encompasses is important. Many was a meeting with a senior exec which started with the depressing question "so .. location ... is it really important?". Nokia gets location; there's absolutely no doubt about that. The question is now how do we deliver real value and real market share with location ... and that's half the fun and half the challenge.
Last month I wrote that a map says as much about the fears, hopes, dreams and prejudices of its target audience as it does about the relationship of places on the surface of the Earth. With the benefit of hindsight I think I was only half way right.
Sometimes a map becomes more than just a spatial representation and becomes something else.
Sometimes a data visualisation becomes more than just the underlying data and almost takes on a life of its own.
When these two things meet or collide the results can be spectacularly compelling and produce, unintentionally ... art? Look at the image below ... filigree lace work? Crochet for the deranged of mind? Silk for the sociopath? Macrame for the mad? Sadly none of the above.
It's instead an image from the Geotagger's World Atlas but it's still unintentionally beautiful.
The maps are ordered by the number of pictures taken in the central cluster of each one. This is a little unfair to aggressively polycentric cities like Tokyo and Los Angeles, which probably get lower placement than they really deserve because there are gaps where no one took any pictures. The central cluster of each map is not necessarily in the center of each image, because the image bounds are chosen to include as many geotagged locations as possible near the central cluster. All the maps are to the same scale, chosen to be just large enough for the central New York cluster to fit. The photo locations come from the public Flickr and Picasa search APIs.
I could look and stare at the all the images in Eric's Flickr set for hours. Correction, I have stared at the images for hours. Photo Credits: Eric Fischer on Flickr.
In the first of this occasional series, I looked at a curiously familiar but not quite right map of the London Underground evilly designed for tourists. In this second part of the series, it's time to cast out gaze out across the English Channel to Europe and how two of the member states see the European Union.
First there's how the Swedes see Europe; Britain is characterised by inventing soccer, inventing hooligans and beer (all three of which may be related) amongst others. The other European countries don't fare much better.
Heading South and slightly East is the self styled Chosen Nation of Hungary. While the descriptions are mostly one or two words, they're not that flattering. Britain is simply jobs, while other member states are characterised as tourist hordes, pizza, last minute hotels and beer land.
It may have escaped your notice but London is pretty much map mad at the moment. If it's not documentaries on the BBC it's exhibitions of maps at the British Library.
Which seems an apt and fitting time to organise an ad-hoc, impromptu, totally unofficial gathering of latent geographers, geo-wonks, map-nerds, professional cartographers and anyone else who likes maps.
Fully intending to use the week off that I have between leaving my role in the Geo Technologies group of Yahoo! and starting my role as [redacted] with [redacted] in [redacted], I'm going to be going to the Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art exhibition at the British Library in the afternoon of Wednesday 2nd. June 2010, followed by a few geobeers in a local hostelry and a cheeky curry afterwards.
Anyone who would like to join me are more than welcome. I've created an Upcoming event for those who'd like to sign up, if you don't have a Yahoo! id and don't want one, add your presence in the comments and if you don't want to do that then just turn up. See you all, however many of you there are, outside the main entrance of the British Library at 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB at 3.00 PM.
It'll probably be geotastic you know.
Photo Credits: Mildly Diverting on Flickr.
London seems to have gone ever so slightly maps crazy of recent. Not only is there the Magnificent Maps exhibition opening at the British Library at the end of this month but BBC4 has joined in with two documentary series on the subject, Maps: Power, Plunder and Possession and The Beauty of Maps.
It's all very geotastic ...
One of the themes that threads through both the BBC4 series is that a map says as much about the fears, hopes, dreams and prejudices of its target audience as it does about the relationship of places on the surface of the Earth. Nowhere could this be more ably demonstrated in some of the bookmarks that have been appearing in my delicious stream over the past year or two ...
First in this occasional series is the Tourist Tube Map. It's the iconic, Harry Beck, design of the London Underground map. Or is it?
Some of those stations don't look like they're in the right place ... and can you really get free admission to the Elephant and Castle?
Pretty much invisible at night, still officially at war with their southern neighbour and under United Nations economic sanctions, North Korea is a blank spot on political maps of the area.
Even the satellite imagery layer in Google Maps has little additional detail to offer.
But compare and contract against the updated imagery for North Korea that Google Earth has had since December of last year.
Finally add in the Google Earth layer that the North Korea Economy Watch has created and all of a sudden North Korea springs into view. Ever wanted to see where the Hoeryong Essential Foodstuff Factory was located? Now you can.
Forgive me; it's been 5 conferences and 2 months since my last Deliciousness post and I offer this one up by way of atonement.
Today's social bookmarking deliciousness, from down the back of the internet.
rm -rf / thus helpfully erasing your root file system. Concentrate now.Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)
This week's selection of what I bookmarked on Delicious.