Mapping Hacks

Last October, Christopher Schmidt mentioned that he was working on a REST-ful Web Processing Server in Python. I don’t recall how push came to shove, but I wound up volunteering to provide vector generalization code for the project.  After failing to find any usable Python implementations of the Douglas-Peucker line simplification algorithm on the Internets, […]

Last week I had the distinct pleasure of attending las 3es Jornadas gvSIG, the third annual gvSIG conference, in Valencia, Spain. gvSIG, as you may know, is a (primarily) desktop GIS system written in Java. The project was initiated in 2003 by the Conselleria d’Infraestructures i Transport for the Generalitat Valenciana, the provincial government of […]

The revolution will not be televised, and the revolution will not come from the creeping crudge of ‘The Internet of Things.’ I’m as excited as Bruce Sterling to have technology help me to keep track of my crap. You won’t need to look for your shoes, you’ll be able to Google Your […]

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” […]

Frank Warmerdam’s latest release of the GDAL/OGR geodata abstraction libraries looks interesting in the stable support it advertises for different languages:

Source:
http://www.gdal.org/dl/gdal-1.3.1.tar.gz
http://www.gdal.org/dl/gdal131.zip

Docs / Web site:
http://www.gdal.org/dl/gdal131doc.zip

Test Suite:
http://www.gdal.org/dl/gdalautotest-1.3.1.tar.gz

The major news with this release is that the “Next Generation” Perl, Python
and Ruby bindings are now considered ready to use, though I’m […]

I’ll just point to HoBu’s summary of the key points of the Open Source Geospatial conference which has left all our heads buzzing, otherwise it’ll take days to write everything down; so many highlights, that the post-impression is just a bright glow.
One big highlight for us was finally getting to meet in real life, our […]

This hack combining google maps US with craigslist caught my eye from the del.icio.us feed. I actually quite liked this one; it gets nearer to the kind of public writability, and was described as “a taste of what the semantic web will do for you”. I have some niggles to do with how far the […]

I have been, i’ll confess, wilfully avoiding Google Maps UK since it was released. I imagined, fairly accurately, that it would depress me. Not so much the service in and of itself, but the critical reaction spawned in comparison with it, and the rueful reflections it provokes on the public quality of our own work […]

Bill Fry is at MIT, and has a page on Genomic Cartograrphy.

There is a space of highly complex systems for which we lack deep understanding because few techniques exist for visualization of data whose structure and content are undergoing continous change. My research focuses on developing approaches to such data, in particular, the human […]

Layton Graphics has released a
plug in for Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader that lets you georegister a PDF.
This is more or less the same as georeferencing a raster image.

George Demmy says it best, so I’ll just quote his mail to the geowankers list

Layton Graphics, the company I work for, has released a plug-in to
Adobe Acrobat […]