Posted late last year about GeoCommons, a free service for uploading and displaying free publicly-accessible geographic data. Run by GeoIQ (formerly FortiusOne), this is the free public version of their commercial GeoIQ geographic data visualization service. If you haven’t been following their recent posts on their blog, you may have missed the huge number of new features they’ve added to GeoCommons and GeoIQ over the past six months:
- The ability to add WMS servers as data layers
- Acetate – the ability to re-order base layers to incorporate your own data
- ESRI tile support
- Version 2.0 – Faster data rendering, easier map creation, and an API
Now they’ve just added a number of GIS-like analytical tools, already in their commercial GeoIQ product, to the free GeoCommons tool:
- Aggregation – point in polygon analysis
- Merge – combine multiple datasets into a single one
- Prediction within a Dataset – correlating data within a single dataset
- Intersection – finding overlapping dataset areas
- Buffer – areas a specified distance from another data block
- Filtered by Distance – Combination of buffering and intersection, finding all data within a certain distance of another set of data
- Custom Analysis – enter your own analysis equations to crunch data.
- Predict Across Datasets – correlating data between different datasets
- Feature Simplification – reduce the complexity of data shapes to make them draw faster and clearer
- Addition and Subtraction – combining data columns within datasets to make new data columns
- Analyze Social Media – Looking at geotagged data from social services like Twitter and Foursquare.
- Shared Analytics – Create your own analytic gadget.
I’ve only played with this a bit, but it looks pretty damn cool; definitely crosses the border between neogeography tools and GIS. The free version is definitely worth a spin if your data can be freely distributed; if not, still worth a look as an example of what their paid/private GeoIQ service can do.