Mapping Hacks

I received an email me asking if there was a way to get a latitude and longitude from a number which his ERP calls a ‘Geocode.’
Forgive my confusion, since I thought the whole point of ‘geocoding’ was to get coordinates, or a code of some sort, which would let you specify the location of something […]

Each time i read another sensationalising “food crisis” article, I grumble. What else is the blogosphere for, but to get things like this off one’s chest;
So, prices of all kinds of food staples are rising globally, rapidly. Some - like rice - are specifically singled out, and specific warnings actually serve to worsen price inflation […]

I enjoyed this talk at FOSS4G, World Digital Library: Designing a Multi-lingual Geographic Search Interface. It was given by an Human-Computer Interaction specialist who offered a snarky commentary on search interfaces designed by programmers for geographers.
Considering the insurmountable opportunities, we come up with some “pretty darn flighty ideas” about how spatial/temporal data search interfaces might […]

“Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.” AJ Liebling
Jo Walsh, our co-author on Mapping Hacks, has never forgotten this. Sometimes it is annoying. I want to say “but look, you can do all this cool stuff with this free (but not open) API? Why struggle to reinvent the map […]

On the Geowankers list Andrea Moe made a query
> I have an existing collection of lat/lons, each representing a place where a
> photo was taken. I want to computationally find the geographic clusters in
> this collection, i.e. the geographic areas with the densest concentrations
> of points. (So it sounds like Andrew’s “location-closeness clustering” […]

Kiran Jonnalagadda sent out an email about ’super high resolution maps of language
distribution around the world.’
The maps are very cool-check it out! The India PDF map is 30/16.5 MB (site
says 30, download manager 16.5). They’re designed to be printed 36″
or wider. Data table and ArcGIS files also available.
http://www.gmi.org/wlms/users/huffman/
Dr. Huffman has classified the languages of […]

I’m always thrilled to see mainstream coverage of open geodata issues, and yesterday’s article in the Guardian, Give us back our crown jewels, is a good read. It talks a lot about the Ordnance Survey’s holdings of geographic data being held back from the public via the archaic mechanism of Crown Copyright.
The article quotes a […]

Today, the Proposed INSPIRE Directive on establishing a spatial data infrastructure in Europe began the process of second reading in the European Parliament. Within one to three months, INSPIRE’s provisions could become law.
Many European citizens and small businesses will be negatively affected by a license, copyright and protection oriented policy towards sharing geographic data inside […]