new jersey geographer

Alcyon Lake

Brought my Blackberry with me on a bike ride around Glassboro and Pitman. I used beGPS One, a Blackberry GPS logging application to record my location every 30 seconds as an NMEA sentence. I then used GPSBabel to covert the file to KML format. You can view the KML of my route here. I also took the geotagged picture of Alcyon Lake at right. Finally, tweets during the trip are also geotagged.

Most of the information we deal with daily (or in this case, generate) has some geospatial component. Why not explicitly recognize the route I took or the places I photographed? Sure, some will feel that geotagging could be abused, but both Twitter and Flickr require you to explicitly allow geotagged information to be shown to other users. Facebook strips out geotagged information from uploaded photos. If there’s no real privacy concerns, you should share your pictures and tweets tagged with geographic coordinates.

The property of a randomly chosen "John Smith"

Mecklenburg County (Charlotte), North Carolina is currently facing an information-sharing predicament. POLARIS, their county-wide interactive web map, currently serves up property ownership information as part of the real property and tax records in the county databases. The county is looking to remove the ability to search by owner to locate land records, mainly because the police are concerned that criminals may use the system to target officers’ homes. I appreciate the concern for the safety of the police force, however theoretically anyone could target anyone else using public records. Just because you have a hammer doesn’t mean you’re going to start hitting people with it. Intentionally crippling a web service and reducing accessibility should always be seen as a major step backwards. (more…)

There’s been a flurry of posts across the web about Please Rob Me, a site that aggregates check-ins on sites like FourSquare, illustrating the fact that we’ve known all along: people are willing to release more information than they realize. Outrage follows once the fact that technology allows information to be easily aggregated and distributed is demonstrated like this. (more…)

This semester, I integrated OpenStreetMap into my GIS II class by requiring students to research an area on OSM that lacked detail and update the map. OSM is a great real-world demonstration of some of the GIS principles we’re discussing in the class, such as topology and how different models represent features in the real world.

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Over the course of 2009, I got involved with OpenStreetMap. If you haven’t used OSM, I suggest you check it out. It’s being updated and used throughout the world, from mapping campuses in New Jersey to aiding the relief efforts in Haiti.

So, during 2009, I had noticed that on OSM, the State of Georgia had land use data. I started to look into how Georgia was so lucky. OSM relies on user contributions, so some savvy user must have added all of those polygons to the map. I contacted that savvy user to find out more. Liber pointed me to some of the methods he and others have used to import GIS data into OpenStreetMap. I was unsatisfied with the existing software, so I looked into the OSM API and wrote my own code to export directly from ArcGIS into the .osm file format.

ExportToOSM.py is my crack at programming an export utility. I wanted something that would export multipolygons from ArcGIS as OSM multipolygon relations and would produce a file free of redundant nodes. I used an earlier version of my script to export the buildings on Rowan’s campus. After fixing a few issues – namely the multipart polygons (take a look at Evergreen Hall, still need to punch in the interior courtyard as a doughnut hole) – I began developing a plan to export NJ’s 2002 Land Use data to OSM.

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On the way home from my grandparents last night, Kate and I were discussing how there are very few Christmas Carols that don’t start with the song’s title in the first line. The only one I could think of last night was “Winter Wonderland.”

Consider how many carols start with their titles:

• Angels We Have Heard On High
• Away in a Manger
• Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella
• Deck the Halls
• Frosty the Snowman
• God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen
• Hark! The Herald Angels Sing
• It Came Upon the Midnight Clear
• Joy to the World
• O Little Town of Bethlehem
• Rudolph, the Red Nosed Reindeer (* sort of)
• Silent Night
• We Wish You a Merry Christmas
• We Three Kings of Orient Are
• What Child Is This?

Are there any others that start with the title? Are there any other genres where many of the songs begin with the song’s title?

Have a Merry Christmas!

New Jersey is a great state to be a GIS specialist, consultant, or student. There is a wealth of GIS data available throughout the state, and that massive amount of data is getting easier to use.

The Office of GIS in the State’s OIT department has made available several statewide layers via WMS. If you’re not familiar with WMS, the gist of the service is that a remote server renders a georeferenced image of map that can be used in your GIS software, whether it’s desktop GIS like ESRI’s ArcMap, or server-side GIS, like TileCache and OpenLayers. Having a WMS service available is an incredible resource. Where the 2007 aerial photographs span several DVDs (just having the 4 MrSID tiles that cover Rowan University requires 23MB of space*), being able to download just the portion of the aerials at the scale you need is wonderful. Coupled with the fact that it renders faster than drawing from tiles over the Rowan network is outright amazing.

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After far, far too long, I’m updating this blog. I originally intended to use this blog to highlight interesting geography and GIS articles with a short commentary. I’ve decided to change direction – the updates you find here will be (hopefully) substantial updates and original content.  I hope to return to somewhat frequent posting, at least once a week.

So what about those links I should’ve been postin’? Well, geography and GIS links are now “microblogged” using Twitter and Facebook. My new employer, Rowan University, is working to develop a Geographic Research Lab. I’ve created a page for the Lab on Rowan’s web site, Facebook, and Twitter. If you’re interested in GIS/Geography news, check us out.

In the near future, I hope to have an update here about my experience uploading a very large GIS data set to OpenStreetMap. We’ll see how that goes, considering my wife’s due date is next week.

Just two days after I wrote about OpenStreetMap, PC Pro, a UK computing magazine, posted a blog about the brilliance of OpenStreetMap.  This entry is a much better introduction to OSM than what I previously wrote.

I recently became involved in OpenStreetMap. After watching it from the sidelines for the past year, I recently started contributing to the map. I wrote a python script to export lines and polygons from ArcGIS to OSM. You can see the results of the script by zooming into Rowan University, where I’ve exported the campus buildings and uploaded them. I’ve also been working to get the various cycle routes throughout the State into OSM. Cycle routes are managed by a myriad of local and state entities, and considering DOT informed me that they do not keep any GIS records of the bike routes or facilities, OSM seems like a natural repository for volunteers to collect and share cycle route data.

I’m also planning a course exercise using OSM. I’m going to encourage students to print out their neighborhood using Walking Papers, recording any updates or fixes, then modifying the OSM data via Potlatch or JOSM. Though it will likely be offered as an extra credit assignment initially, I’m hoping I’ll be able to integrate it and other elements of OSM into my courses in the future.

If you have an interest in mapping or GIS, you should check out OpenStreetMap. Sign up for an account, and start updating in your neighborhood. If you’re in New Jersey, I’ve updated OSM’s wiki with links to the cycle maps to be added, as well as instructions on how to add features to OSM using the State’s 2007 aerial photography. If you’d like to collaborate with me on sharing information via OpenStreetMap, let me know. You can follow me on OpenStreetMap here.