Category Archives: GIS

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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BombSight.org: using current geo data information to illustrate the London Blitz`

We’ve excerpted just a slice of a single view of Bombsight.org’s interactive map of the London Blitz. Our screen grab doesn’t  do it justice – no scrolling, zooming, no selection of time slices.  Check it out.

 

This is a project of the United Kingdom’s National Archives Image Library; we can imagine this map as a point of departure for other datasets, such us as overhead images of the damage and recovery. Compare this to one of the first iterations of the very first data map, Dr. John Snow’s mapping of cholera in London.

300px-Snow-cholera-map-1

WWII-era fire apparatus, Australia (image by Kristarella)

WWII-era ladder truck. Image by Kristarella/Kristarella.com

We’ve got a few reasons for publishing this image: Kristarella, an outstanding web designer and software developer, is also a fabulous photographer, and we encourage you to check out her Photoblog for page after  page of images which will capture your curiousity, imagination and awe. But that’s not, strictly speaking, on-topic.  These reasons are:

  1. We’re about to run a series of posts about firefighting apparatus – which is to say vehicles, mobile firefighting equipment, as opposed to infrastructure (fire water mains, sprinklers, hand-held gear and, as important as the rest, prevention), and thought this mid-20th century piece would be a good reference point;
  2. Note the following screenshot: Kristarella is a leader in managing the metadata – EXIF   (Exchangeable image file format, Wikipedia entry; see alsoEXIF.org) which accompanies digital images. We hope to explore the ways in which EXIF data and images might be used to crowd source risk assessment, disaster planning, and disaster response. So we’ll be exploring Kristarella’s Thesography Plugin, and more tools that will exploit EXIF and other usable meta-data.

Zero Geography: GPS Real-World Gaming in Hybrid Space

Zero Geography reports on a real-time game using GPS devices which has – for our purposes, interesting applications for coordinating SAR or other response efforts. From Zero Geography: GPS Real-World Gaming in Hybrid Space.

A real-time, multiplayer, GPS game for mobiles is being played out in the real-world. The game, played by groups of four or five people, uses a one kilometer radius around any point on Earth to delineate spatial extents in which three or four chasers try to capture one runner. Each one of the players is tracked via a GPS phone and their coordinates are mashed onto a map that they can all see. The only twist that that the runner is always allowed to view the map, whilst the chasers only have access to the map every six minutes. The game is a fascinating way to roll elements of the physical and virtual together into an adrenaline-pumped experience.

Zero Geography is a brilliant blog about matters geographic by a person, persons, or entity named Mark Graham, who is otherwise reticent about identity or contact information. Check it out.