Category Archives: Maps

National Incident Map – quick visual overview

NationalIncidentMap.com has, using a mix of feeds and twitter posts from volunteers, created constantly updated maps, focused on several types of risk with a time-frame of the previous 24 hours. It’s not exhaustive, but it’s a good demonstration of what’s possible with crowdsourcing and aggregation. We’re not sure this could be comprehensive and complete without at least some full-time staff – but it’s still useful. There are also links to the same data in list form, and each incident market includes some data about the incident which it represents.

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National Incident Map is also looking for more volunteers; their pitch, from their welcome page, appears below:

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Vizicities: Rich Geo Data Visualization Tool

Vizicities, now in development, may be the richest and most layered geographic information tool ever, which might make it the ideal urban planning, risk management and disaster response management tool ever. Based explicitly on the data layers in the game SimCity, it’s being developed by Pete Smart and Rob Hawkes.

Here’s a screenshot from SimCity:

SimCity Screenshot

SimCity Screenshot

And here are screenshots of Vizicities, still in early days:

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Jonathan Crowe: how the USGS really does it – or, why the USGS is a little like the O.E.D.

The Supreme Being in Time Bandits had Randall, Fidgit, Strutter, Og, Wally and Vermin. ((See alsoWikipedia entry about Time Bandits

for, among other things, theory that Terry Gilliam meant the Bandits to represent the Pythons.)) Jonathan Crowe of Map Room now brings us the new that the

The United States Geological Survey’s National Map makes use of a corps of volunteers, who are assigned a given area (a USGS quad) and report the names and coordinates of various map features, such as schools, town halls and other facilities, and any changes thereto. The sorts of things that aerial surveys might reveal, but not necessarily identify. Sounds interesting — something a dedicated individual with spare time and a GPS might have a lot of fun doing, akin to what OpenStreetMap volunteers are doing in the UK. (U.S. geographic data is in the public domain, so this may well be the next best thing.) Via Very Spatial

and Catholicgauze.

Maproom post here .

Another example of the amazing thing that can be done by volunteers – and by distributed and coordinated teams of people.
The United States Geological Survey’s National Map makes use of a corps of volunteers, who are assigned a given area (a USGS quad) and report the names and coordinates of various map features, such as schools, town halls and other facilities, and any changes thereto. The sorts of things that aerial surveys might reveal, but not necessarily identify. Sounds interesting — something a dedicated individual with spare time and a GPS might have a lot of fun doing, akin to what OpenStreetMap volunteers are doing in the UK. (U.S. geographic data is in the public domain, so this may well be the next best thing.) Via Very Spatial and Catholicgauze.

Pigeon-based aerial photography; pigeons used in military communications

Let’s hope it doesn’t come to a point where this is the preferred means of communications or cartography in a domestic emergency in the United States. However, Popular Logisticsis committed to makings its readers aware of all types of systems, although we’ll probably drawn the line at squirrels. Here’s an image of a German World War I photo-taking pigeon, from PigeonBlog:

via-pigeonblog-pigeon_camera.jpg

 

Link to concise article on this subject on PigeonBlog here.

Via Cynical-C.