http://mappinghacks.com by Schuyler Erle, Rich Gibson and Jo Walsh Thu, 08 May 2008 21:01:32 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://mappinghacks.com/2008/05/05/douglas-peucker-line-simplification-in-python/ Another one from the "old data made new" file: Bjørn Sandvik of thematicmapping.org has been good enough to make some improvements to our freely available world borders shapefile. (He's also doing some kick-ass choropleth maps in OpenLayers.) The new and improved world borders shapefile is hosted on his website; we ... http://mappinghacks.com/2008/05/02/updated-world-borders-dataset/ About four years ago, Civic Space Labs commissioned me to provide them with a freely available database of US ZIP code centroids. For a while, it was hosted on their site, but at some point the link was broken. Since then, I've gotten about an email a month from people ... http://mappinghacks.com/2008/04/28/civicspace-zip-code-database/ 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 ... http://mappinghacks.com/2008/04/12/on-food-pricing/ Well, "bashed" in the politest, most scholarly possible way, but bashed all the same: A report commissioned by Her Majesty's Treasury, entitled Models of Public Sector Information Provision via Trading Funds, has been published on the official website of the Department for Business, Enterprise, and Regulatory Reform, a UK government watchdog ... http://mappinghacks.com/2008/03/13/osgb-business-model-bashed-by-govt-sponsored-report/ The GeoNames blog carries news of improved commercial service with performance guarantees. The flipside, of course, is a limit on requests that can be made to their free services. The limit is set high enough that it should only affect those making heavy use of the GeoNames web services. They've come ... http://mappinghacks.com/2008/02/28/a-credit-for-a-name/ A member of the Geowanking list asked for advice on pulling 700x700 element chunks out of a 50,000x50,000 element raster file. And doing it in under 10 seconds, please.  That brings up the magical GDAL tools.  The Geodata Abstraction Library.  This is a set of libraries and command line tools which ... http://mappinghacks.com/2008/02/19/using-gdal-to-make-little-images-from-big-ones/ I have been perhaps a bit remiss in not mentioning this here sooner, but Mikel Maron and I are currently engaged in facilitating a series of mapping workshops all across India, informally known as Free Map India 2008. So far we have met with Indictrans in Pune, and organized two-day ... http://mappinghacks.com/2008/02/14/free-map-india-2008/ It sometimes seems as if I've been reading the same Galileo article on the BBC News website for the last three years; only the delivery date changes each year. I missed this summer's news of the collapse of the "consortium of consortiums" that was selected to build, launch and run ... http://mappinghacks.com/2007/12/01/galileo-journey-to-where/ 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 ... http://mappinghacks.com/2007/11/20/gvsig-below-the-water-line/