When we think about open innovation, it is easy to think we mean sharing everything. That is not quite the idea. For me, open innovation is sharing the common load. Let’s dig into that idea a little as we investigate open source technology, geospatial and the power of open innovation. Some things are hard. Hard …
Continuing from disruption in the geospatial age pt 1 where we talked about classic disruption business models and in particular referenced Boundless, Esri and Mapbox. I wanted to highlight another example describing how Planet and DigitalGlobe have been reacting to a highly complex technology & consumer environment.
How grand I am to throw around terms like ‘the geospatial age’ as if I’m some kind of luminary. It sounds wonderful that we might be in some kind of ‘age’, but really, what on Earth does that mean? Well, what I mean is we as a technology community we are closer to geospatial technology […]
I had made the assumption that CartoDB was all about data delivery. Much like the deprecated Google Maps Engine, I had assumed CartoDB’s value was really in fast data rendering and distribution.
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 […]
Google Maps have been with us since February 2005, virtually a decade ago as I write this (expect a party on Feb 8th 2015). From their acquisitions of Where 2 Technologies and Keyhole, Google ignited a cartographic web revolution. Yes, of course there were maps on the internet pre-Google Maps, but Google brought the web […]
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 […]
What’s all the racket? These little artifacts along the edge of the data look like they should be considered nodata however they show up despite setting the nodata to be transparent. Turns out these cells are slightly off-white and were likely introduced during JPEG compression. This can happen with both 0 (black) and 255 (white) nodata values.
Data driven pages allow you to easily create multi-paged map books from one map file that are consistent in appearance. It will definitely make your life easier if you have to break up an area into multiple maps for better viewing of data. For instance, 1:20k maps along a 500km corridor feature, such as a river or pipeline, or 1:10k maps covering a whole municipality.
It is not uncommon for raster data to be large and unruly. Creating tiles is one way to deal with these large datasets and speed up rendering. This post introduces a few handy tools for dealing with raster data while walking through the process of combining multiple raster files to create tiles for a super-overlay […]
