february 2008 archives

Sunday, February 03, 2008

Map of Carnival names revisited

How do map makers prepare for the period of Lent? The cartographers of the Bosatlas van Nederland published a special, updated map of Carnival names, the jocular names that towns assume during the Carnival celebrations. Despite the Bosatlas topping the book charts in October last year, many Dutch municipalities and Carnival clubs complained that their towns did not appear on the map. For compiling the missing Carnival names, the map makers of the Bostlas have been liaising closely with the Oeteldonks Gemintemuzejum, Carnival clubs, municipalities and online forums.

The Dutch chapter of OpenStreetMap also aims to collectively create a map layer of Carnival names and relies on every Carnival club having at least one (sober) member installing the Java Open Street Map Editor! The local news section on the website of the Dutch newspaper Trouw takes this a bit further and presents a Google Maps mash-up of Carnival names. Visitors can submit their photos and reports of the Carnival celebrations.  permanent link for this entry

Friday, February 01, 2008

The end of a mapping hack

Adrian Holovaty's announcement yesterday on the end of Chicagocrime.org is just as an important milestone in the history of web mapping as the end of the Xerox PARC Map Viewer back in 2002. Whereas the Xerox PARC Map Viewer marked the early days of web mapping, mapping hacks such as Chicagocrime.org and Paul Rademacher's HousingMaps unleashed web mapping from the online mapping portals. Without these mapping hacks created by reverse-engineering Google Maps, we may not have had all of these well-documented, JavaScript-based mapping APIs to create the map-based mash-ups that we have all come to love.

Adrian's latest project, Everyblock, is according to himself in many ways the next generation of Chicagocrime.org: it is more than just crime, and more than just Chicago. In a sense, it's very much Neighbourhood 2.0, because the website allows you to type in any address in Chicago, New York or San Francisco to read local news and public information near you.

Thanks to GeekEstate Blog covering my previous blog posting about Neighbourhood 2.0, I found out about Funda Heatmaps. This Dutch real estate website has plotted neighbourhood data from Statistics Netherlands onto Google Maps. Thus, you can explore the area before you buy a property there. The information is still limited to population size, number of houses and level of education, but hey: the website is still in beta for now. Unfortunately, from a cartographic point of view, the choropleth maps are highly unsuitable for visualising absolute values such as population size or number of houses. Proportional symbol maps would have been much appropriate for these topics. Admittedly, it is a step up from the textual representation of the neighbourhood data in Google Earth as available from Statistics Netherlands. For some cartographically pleasing examples, check out the Dutch National Atlas of Public Health. Many maps in this online atlas are also based on data from Statistics Netherlands!  permanent link for this entry