Saw these at a friend’s birthday party last weekend. Fanciful geographies from a collage of old school print maps form the covers of the 4 CDs in the Left of the Dial box set. The first shows San Francisco, California, on the left and Boston, Mass., on the right with Manchester, UK, at top with a London inset.
Version 1.1 brought Natural Earth up to ~7,000 populated places (purple hollow circle icons with labels). Version 1.2 will increase that by 25 times to about 175,000 populated places. It will be available as a supplement to the 1.1 version selection. What does this get you? A 1:1 million scale map of cities around the world and a 1:250,000 scale map of the United States and other select countries. There’s still basic selection work to be accomplished (Santiago Chile has duplicate points now, as does London) and scale ranks need refining (boosting blue 10 million, 5 million and 2 million selections from the 1:1 million black dots on these preview maps).
Because the world’s geo infrastructure sucks, not all the new features will have population counts in the 1.2 version. But most should have areal extent bounds and nesting to indicate if the town is part of a larger metro area. At the 1:250,000 scale (gmaps zoom 11), we start to see actual incorporated towns and unincorporated suburbs, but at the 1:1m scale we’re still dealing primarily in metropolitan and micropolitan features (urban areas that host multiple “cities”).
The names of the feature will also need work, but that will occur after the 1.2 release (India, China, and Central Asia mostly). The version 1.1 locations will be shifted over to use the more accurate geoNames lngLats for about 6,000 features (note Oakland below). Locations were fine at 1:10,000,000 scale but don’t always hold up on zoom in. A later update will incorporate an additional 100,000 places to flesh out the 1:1m scale and maybe a few extra for closer in. Combine these populated places with roads and they start looking like atlas plates 🙂
More preview images after the jump.
More preview maps after the jump.
[Editor’s note: The Washington Post’s Mike Musgrove covers the OpenStreetMap.org phenomenon during a recent meet-up of MappingDC in the nation’s capital.]
Republished from The Washington Post. Sunday, January 31, 2010
By Mike Musgrove
On a cold Sunday morning in Washington, none of the two-dozen scruffy students and techie folks crowded into one side of a bustling cafe noticed as Steve Coast, a 29-year-old British programmer, moseyed in and joined their ranks. They didn’t realize it, but there was the man with a plan to map the world.
They were there to do their part, but that’s the funny thing about being the leader of a large, online movement: Everybody knows your name, but nobody recognizes you.
The citizen cartographers, known as MappingDC, had gathered to help complete Coast’s interactive map of the globe — or at least Washington’s corner of it.
“Maps are expensive and proprietary,” said Coast, sipping on his coffee and explaining the core tenets of the project, called OpenStreetMap. “They should be free.”
Coast had the idea for OpenStreetMap in 2004, when he was a student living in London. Coast had a GPS and a laptop, you see, and he figured that with a little programming magic he could build a map of his local haunts that contained more useful information than any service he could find online.
What’s more, he said, “I figured that if I did that, and he did that, and you did that, then, together, we could put together a jigsaw map of the world.”
Since that day, a few hundred thousand people around the planet have pitched in online to enter information about everything from the name of their local library to an area’s handicap accessibility.
In Germany, the country with some of the project’s most enthusiastic participants, volunteers have very nearly catalogued their country down to the last lamppost. During a recent trip to Atlanta, Coast found that users had paid particular attention to the area’s storm drains, perhaps because of recent floods. In Denver, where he lives, Coast has noticed that users are obsessed with noting every footpath and bike trail.
As with Wikipedia, the premise here is that the collective contributions of an enthusiastic community can create a better service than something a corporate entity could put out on its own.
Sure, Google, with its massive resources, has the wherewithal to hire workers to record the street-level images used in its map service. But “a couple of guys driving a truck down a street don’t viscerally care” about whether they captured your neighborhood’s streets exactly right, said Coast, who was in town to attend a conference by the U.S. Geological Survey.
Remember encyclopedias? The problem with those dead-tree tomes was always that the information printed within could go obsolete the day they were published. It’s always been the same for paper street maps, too. MappingDC and OpenStreetMap project members argue that their map is better because it can be instantly corrected. Again, like Wikipedia, the belief is that the wisdom of the crowd will prevail or fix errors.
[Editor’s note: This real estate pricing guide for London uses a tag cloud map as the main interface. Instead of showing a detailed street map or an alphabetical placename list, they use a geographic tag cloud map. Tags are not sized to price. Rather they is color coded for price. Placement of the labels matches their geographic location (roughly speaking). Like many subway maps, the River Thames provides overall orientation.]
Republished from Net-Listings.Ă‚Â
Finding property, flats or houses for sale or to rent in London
Ă‚Â
Simply click on any area of the map and watch the screen reveal information about that area, price guide for area and links to local Estate Agents.
The new page will show you links to Letting and Estate agents in that area of London, a brief description of that area and a rough guide to rents for typical accommodation. You can also use our “Let All Agents Know I am looking” to assist you find a suitable Estate Agent and Property. The price guide can help you decide an suitable areas based on the rental price of a flat or house in London, England.
More Screenshots:
[Editor’s note: The exhibition of folded paper mountains at Fedrigoni’s London showroom representing an imaginary landscape. The exhibit is @ 5th Floor, 36-38 Hatton Garden, London and will be open until April 30th 2009 (open weekdays 9:30-17:00).]
Republished from Anamorphosis blog.
British Graphic Designer and Art Director Alex Ostrowski, and Illustrator and Set Maker Hattie Newman have just finished building The Fedrigoni Mountains, an impressive model mountain range, fashioned using Fedrigoni papers.
The pair also commissioned twelve intrepid illustrators to ‘explore’ the paper slopes and visualise their discoveries on B1 sheets of paper. Each paper peak was peppered with tiny model clues, including a plane, a native village and an abandoned camp. The illustrators elaborated on these landmarks to conjure an imaginary adventure up the mountains.
[Editor’s note: This MySociety.org article from 2007 shows how an interactive web map can help users narrow down the best places to live or work based on a home prices ($) and commute times (t) by car, bike, bus, or train. Interactive Flash versions of the maps are after the jump. Thanks Lynda!]
Reprinted from MySociety.org.
In 2006, our late friend and colleague Chris Lightfoot produced a series of time travel contour maps, after the Department for Transport approached mySociety about experimenting with novel ways of re-using public sector data.
This mapping work was very important because it provides a potentially revolutionary new way of working out the best place for people to live and work.
Following widespread interest across the net and a major feature in the Evening Standard, the Department for Transport asked us to show them how this work could be taken further, and that is what we are showing here today. Get a quote for your map now
Many of the maps we produced last time were very pretty, but could be somewhat difficult to interpret. We therefore teamed up with Stamen to improve the visual clarity and fun. Our first approach was to improve the base mapping to something more delicate and appropriate, using OpenStreetMap. We then worked on the colours and textures of the contours to make them quicker to interpret. Click on the images for larger versions.
Showing travel times to work at the Department for Transport in Pimlico, arriving at 9am
Click image for bigger version.
© Crown copyright. All rights reserved. Department for Transport 100020237 2007
Showing travel times to work at the Department for Transport in Pimlico, arriving at 9am
Click image for bigger version.
[Editor’s note: Perhaps a bit alarmist but does point to the changing role of maps from conveyances of static sets of edited knowledge into a digital tabla rasa that displays the “where” of an individual user’s search results. Cultural landmarks that used to be included on maps for spatial orientation and perhaps a bit of boosterism are being left off the initial view. Users now have to know a feature exists before it is shown to them or ask for a certain overlay layer. But perhaps this is a reflection, too, on a society where the mainstream has been turned into 1000 separate channels? Or a jaded appreciation of information overload instead leaves us with a dirth of map information. Perhaps cartographic editors are good, after all. Thanks Curt!]
Reprinted from the BBC.
Internet mapping is wiping the rich geography and history of Britain off the map, the president of the British Cartographic Society has said.
Mary Spence said internet maps such as Google and Multimap were good for driving but left out crucial data people need to understand a landscape.
Mrs Spence was speaking at the Institute of British Geographers conference in London.
Google said traditional landmarks were still mapped but must be searched for.
Ms Spence said landmarks such as churches, ancient woodlands and stately homes were in danger of being forgotten because many internet maps fail to include them.
Traditional maps feature landmarks such as museums and art galleries
|
She said: “Corporate cartographers are demolishing thousands of years of history – not to mention Britain’s remarkable geography – at a stroke by not including them on maps which millions of us now use every day.
“We’re in real danger of losing what makes maps so unique, giving us a feel for a place even if we’ve never been there.”
Projects such as Open Street Map, through which thousands of Britons have contributed their local knowledge to map pubs, landmarks and even post boxes online, are the first step in the fight back against “corporate blankwash”, she added.
Missing landmarks
By way of example, Ms Spence said that if someone walked around the South Kensington area of London, they would encounter landmarks such as the Science Museum, Royal Albert Hall and the Natural History Museum, which could not be found on Google Maps.
Elsewhere, Worcester Cathedral and Tewkesbury Abbey are not on their respective Google Maps.
Mary Spence and Adrian Miles discuss internet mapping
“But it’s not just Google – it’s Nokia, Microsoft, maps on satellite navigation tools. It’s diluting the quality of the graphic image that we call a map.”
Ms Spence believes that the consequence will be long-term damage to future generations of map readers, because this skill is not being taught in schools and people are simply handling “geographical data”.
But Ed Parsons, geospatial technologist at Google, said the way in which people used maps was changing.
He said: “Internet maps can now be personalised, allowing people to include landmarks and information that is of interest to them.
“Anyone can create their own maps or use experiences to collaborate with others in charting their local knowledge.
“These traditional landmarks are still on the map but people need to search for them. Interactive maps will display precisely the information people want, when they want it.
“You couldn’t possibly have everything already pinpointed.”
Apparently it’s selling like hotcakes in Britain. TheĂ‚Â 60″ by 40″ wall poster wasĂ‚Â designed byĂ‚Â NB: StudioĂ‚Â originally for the exhibition My London / My City. See more photos and buyĂ‚Â it at:Ă‚Â blanka.co.uk/design/nb_studioĂ‚Â
