Please note that I have updated Fortius One’s Off the Map blog to my blogroll at right. They have an interesting post that highlights the trends for their first month of operating Finder! and Maker! two exciting new tools for the (budding) cartographers for finding spatial datasets and making maps via their Flash based interface, devoped by Andy, Mark, Ben, and David at Axis Maps and shown off at last week’s NACIS mapping conference.
It turns out that most data uploads to their site are in shapefile (which makes sense since that’s the defacto standard for GIS data these days) but the vast majority of downloads are in KML format for people wishing to see the data in Google Earth and other more general audience mapping tools. See this post for more information.
Use Maker! to shorten your map creation process from hours to minutes. Maker! gives you the power to make stunning interactive maps with your own data, GeoCommons public data or both.
Here’s a demo for Finder a browser-based application for finding, organizing, and sharing GeoData in common formats. Search the world’s GeoData or upload your own.
Tags: axis maps, brewer, cartogrammer, finder, fortius1, geocommons, harower, maker
[…] [Editor’s note: Republished from Andy Woodward’s Cartogrammer blog from Oct. 1st, 2008. See my related post here.] […]
[…] note: The same folks at Axis Maps who brought us Finder! and Maker! from GeoCommons (blog post) announce IndieMapper, a new tool for cartographers by cartographers to make awesome maps. When […]