A trail map is seemingly so simple. But, to create a really ‘good’ trail map we need to consider a few key things: 1) Seasonality – your map needs to tell the story of the adventure in hand. For instance a skiing or showshoeing trail should feel cold and wintery. In this case we needed […]
A short example of CartoCSS class-based line rendering. CartoCSS is everywhere it seems. Well, it’s in Mapbox Studio and CartoDB, as well as whatever hand rolled option you choose. (However it is not geoserver CSS, though it looks somewhat similar). I used CartoCSS to render the below image. It’s a nordic ski map and has a […]
Today, Sparkgeo became a CartoDB certified partner. As a celebration we built an awesome cartodb powered trail map! Yay!
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 […]
There is a concept of spatial auto-correlation in GIS (Geographic Information Systems). This is a measure of the degree to which a set of spatial features and their associated data values tend to be clustered together in space (reference). So in small words: similar things tend to hang out together. This is often true of […]
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 […]
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 […]
