I have been taking some time to explore there latest spatial thinking and innovations by Yahoo!. Setting aside some of the current business politics, I think Yahoo! are doing some of the most interesting stuff at the moment.
It started a while ago with their Where On Earth (WOE) IDs. Basically these provide a hierarchical identifier system based on location. I must admit it took me ages to realise what these are all about. I have a map centric view centric view of the world and places, so it seemed very odd at first. WOE IDS geo-tag (i.e. locate) things in a very different way (with no need for a map or lat/lon). When talking about a place all people really care about is what place it is and how to ensure that they are all talking about the same place (even if you might individually define its extent differently). Lets take an example, if we want to share data relating to Soho, how do we make sure we are talking about the same place? So with this system we do not have to argue endlessly about what the lat/lon of Soho is (or even worse try and define it’s extent), all we have to agree on is that Soho is in London which is in England which is in Great Britain, give it an ID and then we know we are talking about the same place…
So what I love about WOE ID is it is a simple non mapping solution to an age old spatial problem. In fact a map is ultimately relegated to just a display function.
So ahy has this now got really interesting? Well Flickr has been storing WOE IDs for geo-tagged photos. From this Yahoo! have been able to predict the extent of places (with WOE IDs) based on the geo-tags for the relevant Flickr photos. The resulting geometries are know as Alpha Shapes. So this is a completely different way to discover more about the geo-extent of a place. Taking the Soho example (which BTW is not an officially defined area) we can define it’s extent by what most people (taking photos) think it is. There are examples and details of this approach here on the Flickr development blog..
What I love about this is that, by taking a non map-centric view of place, Yahoo have developed an approach that can tell us more about what the the perceived geographic extent of a place is. No GIS person would ever think of doing it this way round!
Even better you can get the data yourself (as ESRI shapefiles) and try the software Yahoo use to create the Alpha Shapes (called Clustr).
More details on Alpha Shapes are blogged here too.
Lets hope this innovation continues!
A cool new book, The Atlas of the Real World by Daniel Dorling, Mark Newman and Anna Barford (published by Thames & Hudson), has a whole new series of cartograms. Although using cartograms for representing demographic (and other) information is nothing new, the visual impact and qulaity of these are awesome. I would love to know what software and processes they are using (I am assuming it is automated).
More info is on the CR Blog and Mark Easton’s Blog.
Thanks to Nick Wade for finding this.
Update
I have now noticed that these are done by http://www.worldmapper.org, using “Diffusion-based method for producing density equalizing maps“.
The BBC has a slightly more morbid use of maps here.
Thanks to Kev Pridgeon for spotting this.
Update
Jason Lee points out that these maps were originally done by the guys at Sheffield University. They do some other interesting stuff including defining an actual England North/South divide.
One of my favourite trips in Innsbruck is a trip on the Stubaitalbahn. This is a tram that winds it way out of Innsbruck and into the alpine Stubaital valley and is also a great way of getting into the mountains for some fantastic walking. It is quite intriguing how the tram winds its way around the mountainsides to make it up to the village of Fulpmes. So I thought it would be interesting to create a VE mashup to see the route on a map and most importantly in 3D.
So here is my mashup.
Although it looks good in 2D:
It only really comes to life when you switch to the 3D view:
So how did I make this?
Well I used MapCruncher. MapCruncher is a great free Microsoft tool to take a map image, georectify it and then chop into automatically into tiles which match the Virtual Earth tile specification. It then generates a sample mashup application for you which you can easily modify to you needs.
Essentially I found a map of the line here and imported it into MapCruncher. I then had to match points that correspond on your map and the Virtual Earth mapping. I this case I set about 20 points along the track, at the edge of bends or stations:
Next I set the white areas of the map image as transparent. Then all I had to do is render the tiles using the renderer:
Simple!
For more help there are resources on the MapCruncher site and this video gives a good overview.
Now I only need to get some photosynths done of the trams and I’m a fully fledged tram-spotter….
I found this story interesting. Flickr is now using Open Street Map data in areas where there own Yahoo maps are poor. An interesting and sensible approach. Will Yahoo Maps follow suit?
More from Flickr here.
I love this site http://www.handmaps.org For me it is what all maps about - designed for a specific use, person and time. Next step is using MapCruncher…
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