From the category archives:
The Islands Trust, which focuses on preserving island communities in British Columbia, have just launched MapIT as a means to explore island properties and ecosystems for better land-use planning and resource management. The Islands Trust Area covers the islands and waters between the British Columbia mainland and southern Vancouver Island, including Howe Sound and as [...]
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The USO and the White House have teamed to set up a map-based interface for citizens to share their thanks for the service of military personnel this Thanksgiving. The Thanks from Everywhere online site allows you to write a quick note to troops and veterans that will be added to a map with messages from [...]
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Over the weekend, NPR highlighted the work of researchers in Baltimore that are following addicts and their behavior very closely to track movement as well as the behaviors that coincide with their drug use. Researchers in the methadone program that serves addicts are studying specifically what makes addicts relapse with a smartphone program that requires [...]
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Arnulf Christl, president of the OSGeo Foundation lead off the FOSS4G event this week in Denver, providing an overview of the leading voice for Geospatial Open Source software. By 2011 there are now 19,471 unique subscribers to OSGeo, more than 400 mailing lists, and more than 15 million lines of code, with 740 contributors, and [...]
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Coleman McCormick from SpatialNetworks spoke to the viability of OpenStreetMap (OSM) data for commercial use this morning at the State of the Map conference. He related that data used to be a heavy effort that took a great deal of time to find, but now with OSM quality increasing, it’s become an easier problem to [...]
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Richard Weait gave the opening keynote this morning for the State of the Map Conference in Denver. He congratulated the attendees for their commitment and asserted that the only way that we can create an updated map is through crowdsourcing, because commercial entities and governments can’t do it as the economics aren’t feasible. Getting everyone [...]
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On the eve of one of the biggest geospatial developer conferences, FOSS4G in Denver, it’s perhaps fitting that there’s an inspirational story about the lowly start of Google Maps in today’s Startup Smart publication out of Australia. Lars Rasmussen, the co-creator of Google Maps discusses the sometimes difficult path that led to the breakthrough in [...]
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The GEOS Institute, based in Ashland, Oregon, has developed tools and methodology to help communities respond and adapt to the pressures of climate change. Yesterday, I attended a presentation at the GIS in the Rockies by Jessica Leonard, geospatial analyst at the institute, and learned more about their approach and their projects. Leonard stated at [...]
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The success of local community mappers to collect information about the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya has received wide global coverage as an example of the power of the new more accessible crowd mapping tools. This 2009 effort was successful in putting this slum that houses 250,000 people onto the world map, and now they’re [...]
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According to a paper from the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the introduction of low-cost barbed wire fencing to the American Plains led to more efficient land use, rising settlement rates, increased land values, and greater crop productivity. Before the land was fenced, farmers risked uncompensated damages from others’ livestock, and this risk and high cost [...]
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