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Archive for the 'data' Category

Mashup And Map Demographic Statistics With DataMasher

Published by
Leszek Pawlowicz
at November 12, 2009 in data. 0 Comments

Take one of DataMasher’s 90-odd datasets (demographic, economic, energy, health, etc. data by US state), add/subtract/multiple/divide it by another dataset, and plot the results as a choropleth map (plus get the results in tabular form):

2009-10-31_204803

Mashups are posted publicly for comment and ratings. Results may be significant, or be totally devoid of meaning; YMMV. DataMasher makes no claims as to the statistical validity of any of the maps created. You can also select and plot individual datasets by themselves. There’s a short video on how the process currently works, and DataMasher promises more datasets and capabilities are coming.

Via Lifehacker.




Historical Marker Database

Published by
Leszek Pawlowicz
at November 4, 2009 in cartography and data. 0 Comments

The Historical Marker Database (HMdb.org) is a voluntary effort to document and catalog historical markers, mainly from the US and Canada (a few markers from foreign countries are also listed). Markers are listed by category and state; you can also search by multiple parameters (keywords, postal code, county, etc.). Marker info pages have a photo of the marker, a copy of the marker text …

histmarker

… latitude/longitude of the marker, a context photo showing the general surroundings of the marker, and a list of other nearby markers. A link will take you to a Google Maps page showing the location of the marker and other nearby markers; a link at the top of the map page will let you download a GPX file with all the marker positions for upload to your GPS unit (TomTom POI files are also available). There’s even a custom version of the page for mobile phone; enter your latitude/longitude and get a listing of up to 20 markers near your current location.

The site also accepts submissions of historical makers not yet in the database (requires free registration).




Embeddable US Demographics Map

Published by
Leszek Pawlowicz
at October 7, 2009 in ESRI, Web apps and data. 0 Comments

As a demo of the ArcGIS API for Flex, ESRI has a new page that lets you create an embeddable/shareable map of demographic data by US county. Only seven datasets available now:

  • Median Household Income
  • Population Change 2000-2009
  • Population Density (per sq. mile)
  • Median Home Value
  • Unemployment Rate
  • Average Household Size
  • Median Age

Map creation is trivially easy – select the demographic dataset from a dropdown, zoom the map to the desired extents, set a map size in pixels, and you’re done; links to a map with your parameters, and code for an embeddable map, are generated automatically. Here’s an embedded map, scrollable and zoomable; unemployment rate is the defaultdataset, but you can choose other sets with the dropdown menu at upper right:

More datasets would be nice, as would control over colors and ranges …

Via GIS And Science.




Mapping Anthropogenic Biomes

Published by
Leszek Pawlowicz
at October 1, 2009 in cartography, data and global warming. 0 Comments

Yesterday’s post was about a site that categorized biomes with very fine divisions based on vegetation, soil moisture, surface lithology, etc., all with the underlying concept that for most areas this was a representation of an actual natural biome. The creators of the concept of anthropogenic biomes go in a different direction; they believe that the impact of man upon the natural landscape has been so profound, with only about 11% of the earth’s surface still truly6 wild,  that most of the biomes of the world must be described by at least partially including the effects of mankind. They’ve broken down biomes into just 21 categories:

Anthro_biomes_legend_v2

And created a world map using these categories:

anthrome_map_v1

You can download a PDF of the above image, an ArcGrid file for use in ArcGIS, or a KML file for viewing in Google Earth on this page. Viewed in Google Earth:

anthrobiomes

Also available are map viewers for this data in Google Maps and Virtual Earth (latter didn’t work on Firefox for me).

You can watch a Discovery Channel video on the concept of anthropogenic biomes here.

Via Highly Allochthonous.




High-Resolution Terrestrial Biome Data

Published by
Leszek Pawlowicz
at September 30, 2009 in data and global warming. 0 Comments

The USGS Global Ecosystems Viewer (background info here) lets you view terrestrial biome data in very fine detail, with extensive categorization levels. Coverage is currently limited to the US, but the background page indicates that the rest of North America, South America and Africa are currently being worked on. Click on the map, and get a popup detailing vegetation classification, lithology, moisture, terrain, and other data:

biomepopup

For this example, the Ecosystems data is:

Ecosystem:
Southern Rocky Mountain Ponderosa Pine Savanna (580)

Topo Moisture Potential:
Dry Uplands (3)

Land Surface Form:
Hills (6)

Surficial Lithology:
Non-Carbonate Residual Material (3)

Isobioclimate:
Upper Supramediterranean Dry (51)

and the Topographic data:

Elevation:
2248 meters

7375 feet

Slope:
8°

Aspect:
102° (E)

You can also do a colored plot of any of the ecosystems parameters by themselves, like this one of the Surficial Lithology:

surfaceforms

With a button to bring up the legend in a pop-up window:

formslegend

Background imagery can be satellite photos (as in the example above) with and without borders and placenames, topographic maps (USGS 100K), or no background at all. Finally, you can order data for your current view for download in georeferenced format (UTM, Albers or geographic projection) in ArcGrid, GeoTiff or ERDAS IMAGINE formats. Data will be prepared and available for download via FTP; you get email notice of this, but there’s also a status update page you can use. When I tried it, the data was ready for download in less than five minutes.

Via Spatial Sustain.




Free Vector Country Borders, Administrative Boundaries, And Soon More

Published by
Leszek Pawlowicz
at September 23, 2009 in GIS, data and shapefile. 4 Comments

Wish I’d known about this site when I was hunting for a high-res border outline for the province of Umbria in Italy. The Global Administrative Boundaries website offers free vector GIS data for country borders and administrative areas within those borders. Data is available in geographic coordinates (lat/long), WGS84 datum, in multiple formats:

Coverage is worldwide for level 1 data (country borders), but diminishes as you go down as far as level 4 (sub-administrative units), though for the latter there are some countries for which such a data level isn’t relevant. You can see maps of current level coverage here, and missing data will likely be added in the future. Data is licensed under Creative Commons for the US; other unspecified terms may apply for the rest of the world. Here’s the Italian province of Umbria, with the best free data I could initially find plotted in purple, and the high-res GADM data in blue:

umbria

Via Slashgeo.

Just around the corner, scheduled for unveiling at the October 2009 NACIS conference, is Natural Earth Vector. While there’s some overlap with GADM at the upper boundary levels, Natural Earth Vector may not include some of the finer administrative boundaries available in the GADM . But it will have a wide variety of other geographic features not available in GADM in vector format at multiple zoom levels (list from the web post):

  • Continents (North America, Europe, Asia, etc)
  • Cultural regions (South Asia, West Africa, etc)
  • Countries (US, Canada, Mexico, etc)
  • Country sub-divisions (for the US, states, semi-independent territories, dependencies, associations)
  • Disputed territories (like Kashmir, Northern Cyprus)
  • 1st order admins (states, provs)
  • Bathymetry
  • Lakes
  • Lake Center Lines
  • Rivers (including attributes that allow easy “tapering” of drains)
  • Islands
  • Glaciers
  • Populated places (urban boundaries, not city points)
  • Cities (point locations)
  • Physical features like peaks, ranges, valleys, plains

I’ll try to post again when it’s officially released.

Via Kelso’s Corner.




Excel Spreadsheet Data To Google Earth Thematic Map

Published by
Leszek Pawlowicz
at May 13, 2009 in Google Earth, data and spreadsheet. 0 Comments

After yesterday’s post on thematic mapping in Google Maps, John Stewart  of the University of North Carolina’s MEASURE program wrote to tell me about their own thematic mapping tool, the E2G Thematic Mapper. This Microsoft Excel macro spreadsheet data and links it with polygon data for countries and their administrative units to create thematic maps for Google Earth:

Excel data to Google Earth thematic map

Image is from the excellent PDF manual included with the distribution. I can’t try it out because I don’t currently have a computer with Excel (2003 or 2007), and it doesn’t seem to run on Open Office Calc.

It also currently only has polygon data for sixteen countries:

  • Botswana
  • Côte d’Ivoire
  • Democratic Republic of the Congo
  • Ethiopia
  • Guyana
  • Haiti
  • Kenya
  • Mozambique
  • Namibia
  • Nigeria
  • Rwanda
  • Tanzania
  • Uganda
  • Vietnam
  • South Africa
  • Zambia

But John says that an update coming this summer will add polygon data for more countries, along with more macro features.

If you’re interested in field data acquisition, the entire Monitoring and Evaluation Systems section of the MEASURE site is worth a look.




Marine Navigation GIS Data

Published by
Leszek Pawlowicz
at April 22, 2009 in GIS and data. 5 Comments

SM asks if I know “any free or commercial data source for boat landing or (boat ramp) sites…? I am especially interested in IL,IN,OH,and MI area.”.  My first idea was to check two US Government sources of marine GIS map data.

Continue reading ‘Marine Navigation GIS Data’




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