Geospatial data in particular is opinionated. Now, opinion isn’t always a great thing. Opinion doesn’t mean you know better, it just means you have a particular view of the world and feel comfortable in maintaining that perspective.
I love technology. I get wowed by amazing new computing platforms, new technology experiences, new ideas about how to interact with machines and computers. I get thoroughly dazzled by how clever people are and how the right group of people can create the most amazing things. But technology is like the weather in Scotland; wait a […]
Scale has taken on a completely new meaning for me. In my training and early career, scale referred to a conversion measurement indicating a comparison between a measurement on a paper map and a measurement in the real world. The big ‘thing’ about GIS was that it was scale-less; you could zoom in as much […]
Analytics are a great tool for monitoring and reporting on website traffic and user interactions. It is reasonablely expected that, as a web developer I will use analytics to better understand my users and deliver them with incrementally improving services and experiences. At Sparkgeo we build web maps. We have been doing this for half a […]
Will Cadell (@geo_will) presented at FOSS4G 2014. He talked about the importance of considering the commonwealth of data when publishing open data products. Check out his presentation here >>> Presentation Description Up in the frozen wastes of the Northern British Columbia, we organized a hackathon. We based it on the ideas of open data and […]
Dustin Sampson (@gridcell), one of our geospatial developers presented the core ideas behind tracking slippy map analytics at FOSS4G in September (2014, Portland). Check out his presentation here >>> Presentation Description Google Analytics is a great tool for monitoring and reporting on website traffic and user interactions but what it doesnt tell you is that […]
This is a quick note on how to map images in a directory purely from their exif files. An exif file is one which contains the meta data of the image. If the image was taken by a phone of GPS enabled camera, then a location will also be contained within that file. To read […]
GeoJSON is a great format, easy to read/view/use but one thing that really stands out is the verbosity of numbers and its effects on file size. Yeah in rare cases it “may” be needed but I’m pretty sure a length that is precise to, well less than a millimeter (example: stream length: 6849.41980435 meters) is […]
I’m heading to beautiful Vancouver this evening to attend the Canadian Open data Summit Tomorrow! I’m very excited to be able to give a lighting talk about open data and how we can make it even better! Disparate Data, Technology Fiefdoms (and 65 pictures of your cat) Up in the frozen wastes of the North, […]
Earlier in this series we pulled together a PostGIS database of US Census Polygons and displayed them on a Google Map. To do this we used the mighty Mapnik via node.js by using the node-mapnik connector. This tutorial will show you a way of displaying all those […]
