“Broadband access supports our economy, attracts businesses, and enables Indiana to be globally competitive.  It improves the quality of life for Hoosiers through better communication and learning,” says Jim Sparks Indiana Geographic Information Officer regarding Indiana’s participation.

The mapping portion of the program intends to identify areas that are underserved and ideally expand access to those areas. Indiana is an active participant in the program, and rightly so – several areas of the state and key demographics are currently underserved. From an user interface perspective, personally I find the national broadband availability maps (different from the IndianaMap) leave something to be desired. I find them generally too technical to communicate much to the average consumer, though they surely are packed with information that will assist at the national program level. Be sure to look at the “Show Gallery” link at the bottom of the page for some nice perspectives (it is easily missed). As a work in progress, it is also worth keeping in mind that the maps may over-represent some areas and under-represent other areas based on individual states’ current participation in the mapping program.

Lest we underestimate the potential impact of the broadband program in Indiana, let us look at the current “state of the state” according to another source, PatchworkNation.org:

Wow, Indiana really stands out.

RMI (Rocky Mountain Institute) provides a timeline-based interactive map depicting the U.S.’s historical imports of oil since 1973. Map controls can slide to specific dates and highlight five periods by major oil crises, including history briefs in the sideline. Map units can be displayed in oil or U.S. dollars. Map can also be put on auto-play. This is a well-done interactive map and interesting visualization of the flow of resources over time.

Rocky Mountain Institute is an independent, entrepreneurial nonprofit think-and-do tank™ that drives the efficient and restorative use of resources (from the RMI website).

Hand-drawn sketching plays an important role in the digital arts. The larger a project is, and the more concepts a client will need to see, the more sketching will prove its worth in your design process. Consider using rough sketches for composition or layout options in your next project. Or push yourself to do a handful of thumbnail sketches before firing up your cartography software of choice. Create ten well thought out map design options (not seven to make three look good).  Select three and refine each.  Select one for final design.

In Role of Sketching in the Design Process, Sean Hodge discusses sketching for rapid concept development in traditional design.  This same process should be considered in cartography.

Example Map by XNR Productions

Those who design maps for use by others engage in a specialized form of communication.  They create images to represent physical and phenomena in three-dimensional space, but they create them on two-dimensional surfaces. To do this effectively, a cartographer must understand not only the phenomena on which the maps are based, but also how to work with them to communicate information to others.  No amount of skill with computer software can rescue a map that displays a lack of understanding of the cartographic design process.

Cartography is a PROCESS, thus should follow a well thought out sequence of steps from conception to finished product. “So, what exactly are your intentions?” Know how the map is intended to be used at the beginning of your project. What is the presentation media? e.g., print, projected, web. What is the size? Is it interactive? How often does it need updating? Show examples of how you would create the same map differently depending on the presentation format.

PROCESS – A process is a naturally occurring or designed sequence of changes of properties or attributes of an object or system. More precisely, and from the most general systemic perspective, every process is representable as a particular trajectory (or part thereof) in a system’s phase space. (adapted from Wikipedia)

A map must be designed foremost with consideration to the purpose, the audience and its needs. In order to convey the message of the map, the creator must design it in a manner which will aid the reader in the overall understanding of its purpose.

What is your first step when someone asks, “Can you make me a map of…?“  Here are some questions you should ask (of your client and yourself) during the cartographic design process. It is recommended you make your own process list and format it as a form that you can re-use with each new project:

Purpose

• Why are you making your map?
• Who is your audience?
• Primary audience:
• Secondary audience:
• Expert or non-expert?
• Busy or motivated?
• Able or disabled?
• Other comments:
• What should the map assert?
• What do you want to communicate?

Data

• What data are needed?
• Existing or new?
• Sources?
• Is field data collection required?
• Is analysis required?
• Do you need to convert/geocode data?
• Are there copyright issues?
• Age of data?
• Is there a budget for the data?

Tools

• What tools will you use?
• Other comments:

Design

• What is the geographic framework?
• Layout?
• Will it be coordinated with other text? Or stand-alone?
• Intellectual & visual hierarchies?
• Map generalization and classification to be used?
• Map symbolization?
• Are there existing standards that must be followed?
• New symbols to be created?
• Type / font(s) to be used?
• Use of color or black & white?
• Existing color scheme?
• Other comments:

Media

• What is the final medium? (paper, poster, projected, Internet, interactive, computer monitor, other)
• Resolution / scale?
• Viewing distance?
• Requirements for final file formats?

Evaluation and Acceptance

• Who will approve the finished map?
• What are the time constraints?
• What is the budget?
• Other comments:

Thanks to john krygier | denis wood, authors of making maps:a visual guide to map design for gis for their inspiring insight in the chapter “Why are you Making your Map?”

ScapeToad is an interesting, free, stand-alone cartogram software for Mac, Windows (and available platform independent). ScapeToad 1.1 is available for download under a GPL license.

Classical thematic mapping displays spatial patterns of theme or series data depicted on familiar reference maps of standard land-area polygons, which are typically distorted only by the selected projection. A cartogram is a map in which some thematic mapping variable – such as travel time or Gross National Product – is substituted for land area. The geometry or space of the map is distorted in order to convey the information of this alternate variable. There are two main types of cartograms: area and distance cartograms. To see examples, WorldMapper.org provides a nice collection of cartograms.

(from the ScapeToad website) “The visualization of social phenomena through classical thematic mapping often leads to unsatisfying representations… Cartograms are a well-known technique used to compensate for this inconvenience by breaking the link between statistical regions and their topographical areas. Consequently, this liberates one visual variable (that of polygon size) for a more relevant use, such as the representation of the relative social importance of these regions (usually measured by the size of their populations), while leaving intact their topological relations.”

Thematic Mapping Engine (TME) enables you to visualise global statistics on Google Earth. The primary data source is UNdata.

The engine returns a KMZ file that you can open in Google Earth or download to your computer.

Data File Types

This no-cost GIS platform seems well positioned for enterprise implementations due to its impressive ability to use vector (shp, dgn, dxf, dwg, gml, etc.), raster (ecw, mrsid, tiff, img, jpg2000, etc.), and it’s ability to connect with remote services like WMS, WFS, WCS, JDBC (geodatabases), catalogue, and gazetteer services (though maybe with a bit more development; there are some known problems that may merit holding off) . This likely stems from its government sponsorship by the “Conselleria de Infraestructuras y Transporte” (Council of Infrastructure and Transportation) of the “Generalitat Valenciana” (Regional Government of the Comunidad Valenciana in Spain) and its strong orientation to manage geographic information and towards Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI).

Adding Your Own Data

Installation was easy. Even though a standard install file wasn’t available, it was easily created and I was up and running within about 60 seconds.

I’m one of those who dive right into a piece of software and then follow-up with the instructions if I can’t figure it out. While I didn’t find the interface immediately intuitive, MicroImages provides a good quick-start guide (January 2007 on version 1.0.1) that I found quite helpful for adding a WMS. Adding shapefiles and ArcIMS worked in much the same way. The gvSIG website states that most users of ArcView should find the interface intuitive. Unfortunately, its been a while since I’ve been on that platform.

Cartographic Features

Editing the symbology of layers was pretty straight forward. While the symbol sets are limited (small group of points and hatching), there appeared to be an option to add your own point graphics. Standard color ramps (swatches) and RGB menu ware available, as well as transparencies. Cartographic rendering options include display of unique values, intervals, and labeling with a similar interface to ArcGIS.

I probably missed it, but I didn’t see a print menu. Nonetheless, under VIEW>EXPORT users can export the map image to the following formats: JPG, BMP and PNG files.

Analysis

I was able to use the geoprocessing tools, but found them a bit buggy and slightly clunky (for example, I changed the map and measurement units before preforming a buffer operation, but they didn’t seem to stick). The following analysis functions are available, complete with graphic depiction and description (in English) of the function:

Proximity

-Buffer

-Spatial Join

Overlay

-Clip

-Difference

-Intersect

-Union

Computational Geometry

-Convex Hull

Aggregation

-Dissolve

Data Conversion

-Merge

-XY Shift

-Re-project

To support SDIs, future development would definitely benefit from the ability to re-project map data “on the fly.”

Overall I found the system impressive, though there may be a way to go on development and usability. It seems the team is well on its way and has the right support to make this a great open-source option for desktop and enterprise GIS.

Editing

While I haven’t tested it out yet, the system appears to have a full range of vector editing tools. Users can also create new layers. Users have the ability to export layers in shape, Oracle spatial, dxf, postGIS, GML raster and annotation.

Other Stuff

In addition to the MAC platform, at FOSS4G2007 the first migration of the gvSIG product (http://www.gvsig.gva.es) to mobile platforms was presented. This first launch is a brand-new open-source GIS client to be used in PDAs, with a good set of capabilities which fills a gap in the FOSS4G panorama, under a GPL license.

______

The third gvSIG Conference will be celebrated the next November 14th, 15th, and 16th in the Valencia Conference Centre. Congrats to the entire gvSIG Team for the contributions they have made thus far. I’m looking forward to following its development.

First, let me give a quick overview of what I have found… (a more comprehensive review of these systems is on cartographica.com). The tools I’ve downloaded so far are Quantum GIS (QGIS), UDig, SimpleDEMViewer, and OpenOX-Grass. The biggest disappointment is none of the really easy ones have any ANALYSIS capability — I personally don’t think it is a GIS if you can’t analyze the data. Viewing the data is great, but I definitely need more. Also, let me admit I am not sophisticated enough of a Mac user yet to do everything required to run OpenOX-Grass (it requires Apple X11) but I will try to work toward this because it does look very powerful http://openosx.com/grass/grass.html and the price (~$60 US) is right. Also, QGIS with Grass support looks very promising (if I can figure out how to implement it). My conclusion with these existing programs is that those that are easy enough to plug-and-play lack basic analysis capabilities, and those that show promise for being very powerful are limited by not being plug-and-play.

This brings me to a review of My World GIS (v4.1.1) for the Mac (it can also run on a PC). So far I have been pleasantly surprised.

My World GIS

Northwestern University has developed a GIS called My World, which engages ESRI’s MapObjects Java technology. My World is distributed by Pasco Scientific (http://www.pasco.com/myworld/). Built in Java, My World runs on Macintosh OSX and Windows environments. It provides a robust subset of capabilities from a professional GIS environment, including multiple projections, table and map view, hyperlinks, and a common language approach to conducting analyses. It is marketed to educators, but licensing is also available for non-educational use (for research or other non-educational uses) directly from Northwestern University (currently priced at $99 US per single license). There is a fully functional 45-day trial period available.

Data File Types

My World supports the following types of data files and/or folders for reading and writing shape data:

* ESRI Shapefile, Comma-Separated Values, Tab-Separated Values, and GPX Waypoint Files; plus a variety of Grid and Image file types, and WMS data feeds (more info here).

Adding Your Own Data

I did find adding my own shape files a bit confusing at first since My World doesn’t support the shape files in their native projection and requires them to be un-projected. That this wasn’t totally straight-forward was my only real disappointment with My World. But once I got past the hassle involved with importing my own data, I had a lot of fun with this program.

“My World accepts shape data only in Unprojected Latitude and Longitude in Decimal Degrees, and the longitude must be in the range -180 to +180 (rather than 0 to 360).

If your data uses another projection or different units, you can use My World to un-project and convert it to the proper units by selecting Un-Project Shapefile… from the File menu, or by clicking the Import Data From File… button in Construct mode.

My World accepts projected grid and image data, but you must know all the details of the projection used to project that data before you can use it in My World.”

How I added my own shape files… (some data does come pre-packaged)

I had to really experiment with this before being able to import my shape files and have them show correctly on the map. I was successful using the following steps:

1. I copied my existing data into a temporary folder before using the “Un-project” function (and DEFINITELY HAD A BACKUP OF MY ORIGINAL DATA ON AN EXTERNAL DRIVE).

2. I also created a new folder in the Data directory (in the My World application folder) to hold my data after I un-projected it.

3. When I used the “Un-Project” function, I saved the new files into the new directory folder (I got errors every time I just replaced the existing files).

4. I then deleted the temporary folder containing copies of my original data (My World gets confused if it finds 2 datasets with the same name).

5. Under the “Construct” tab, I added my data to the map by simply dragging and dropping the layer from the Library to the Layer list.

6. You can set the map projection later.

Now the fun part – seeing what My World can do.

Note, under the Visualize and Edit tabs, single click a layer to make it active and double click the layer to set parameters or edit.

Cartographic Features

I am pleasantly surprised by the cartographic capabilities of My World. You can outline and fill polygons with any standard or custom RGB value, easy create color ramps, categorize data, create dot density maps, transparencies, etc. If you’re familiar with commercial GIS platforms it should be pretty intuitive (and maybe even easier). There are about 20 shapes for point symbols, all of which you can control the size, color and transparency.

Labels (Annotation)

In My World you don’t label features per se, you create annotations. This wasn’t intuitive and was kind of buried in the documentation (especially since I was expecting labeling to be done in the same place as symbology), but it was really easy to do once I figured it out. Under the Edit tab, you have to click create new layer. One option you will be presented with for the new layer type is “Annotation.” You can then create an annotation layer from an existing layer, select the existing database field for the annotation, choose from a wide array for fonts, colors, sizes, style, alignment etc. While you can’t do a halo, you can do a background block color and make it transparent to help your text stand out. And since it is annotation, you can just select and move your text around to improve placement. Pretty sweet.

Analysis

This is by far my favorite part.

Not only is it robust, but the analysis menu is also super easy to use. Again, if you know GIS and how to do analysis it should be pretty intuitive. Otherwise, there is pretty good documentation available. For example, I was able to very easily “select by spatial relationship” all the building features (first layer) that were within 15 feet of all commercial properties (second layer)(see example). You have the option to save this as a new layer, or make it a selected subset of the existing layer. All the analysis capabilities for selecting by value, by comparing values, by spatial relationship; combining by intersect, union, subtract, and clip; adding fields by math operation, by copying values, reclassifying, computing distances, and selecting members; creating charts of the data, buffering data; dissolving, summarizing statistics, and converting data are all in one place, intuitive and easy to use, and come with a menu complete with graphic depiction of the operation. Wow.

Editing Data

From the edit tab, you can create new layers and/or edit the geometry and data for any of your existing layers, including grids. I easily moved vertices and created new polygons. A note of caution, it seems to automatically save your changes, but there is an undo button or ctrl-Z.

Other Stuff

Overall, the data were pretty zippy to load large files and Web Map Services (WMS). While this wont replace your enterprise GIS, it is a fine system for stand-alone GIS use on your Mac. Besides my own use, my kid’s school only has a Mac computer lab and I now have a good option for getting GIS into their curriculum. I personally am thrilled to have a functional GIS option for my Mac.

My World GIS – I put in the category of “robust low-cost GIS; professionals will be surprised.”