The “Danger” of Creative Commons

Posted on August 30, 2010 by John Reiser

Creative Commons logoBeing that I’m a planning and transit buff, I take a lot of pictures of urban spaces and infrastructure for use in my planning work. I post many of the pictures to Flickr, as the site’s a great service and it supports geotagged photos taken with my GPS camera. With the exception of pictures of family and friends, all of my pictures are public and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution, Noncommercial, Share Alike license. This allows anyone to use my photographs for most uses, explicitly non-commercial use, provided they note that I am the source of the image. Well, what happens when someone you disagree with uses that image to promote his or her agenda? What if that person is Senator John McCain?

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Posted in Government, In the News | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Changing Landscapes: Final Thoughts

Posted on August 5, 2010 by John Reiser

After all of the hustling to get, in my opinion, a rather significant web application together in little under a month by myself, I feel that I can offer a few thoughts on managing a project with limited timeframe. Continue reading →

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Changing Landscapes: A Great Release

Posted on August 4, 2010 by John Reiser

Release date was finally here. I woke up in a panic just before 6am because I fell asleep before John sent me the PDF of the report to be posted to the website. I posted the report, double checked to make sure everything was in order, and then visited NJ.com to read the article. I knew that the article was limited to around 500 words, but I was still hoping for the best. (An aside: why aren’t all newspapers considering a brief short version and a longer web version for their articles? It’s not like there’s a restriction on word count on the Web.) The article was there and it was pretty good, all things considered. But, there was an egregious omission – a link to the report.

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Changing Landscapes: A Million Little Tiles

Posted on August 3, 2010 by John Reiser

A view of "Camelot" a residential development in New JerseyThe New Jersey Land Change Viewer, the online component of the Changing Landscapes research project required the generation of approximately one million map tiles. These tiles needed to be served quickly – the online viewer is meant to make the findings of the project and the ramifications of New Jersey’s urbanization patterns readily apparent to the general public. Long wait times do not help get your point across, so we used Amazon Web Services to store and distribute the map tiles.

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Posted in Aerial Photography, Data, In the News, Technology, Visualization, Web Mapping | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Changing Landscapes: Brainstorming

Posted on August 2, 2010 by John Reiser

This gets the GIS geeks excited.

Back in June, the New Jersey DEP Bureau of GIS released the 2007 Land Use/Land Cover data. The data was released in record time, just slightly over 3 years from the aerial photography date. We felt that we needed to release our findings as soon as possible after the release of the data. Before the data was released, John and I began discussing ways that we could make the data presentable to the public in a much more engaging manner than static maps in a PDF report.
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Posted in Data, Google Maps, In the News, Technology, Visualization, Web Mapping | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Release of “Changing Landscapes in the Garden State”

Posted on July 28, 2010 by John Reiser

animation of the progression of urban developmentJohn Hasse and Richard Lathrop have been studying land use change in New Jersey since 2002. Their previous reports have been the impetus of many discussions on urban sprawl, environmental protection and resource planning in New Jersey. The reports themselves were released shortly after NJ DEP released their updates to the statewide land use/land cover data. This data set covers 1986, 1995, 2002 and released just one month ago, 2007. Over the past month, I’ve been working on the report’s website, hosted at Rowan on our GIS server. The last month has literally been a blur as we’ve worked to get the data for the report together and then into a series of interactive, animated web maps that show the progression of urban change over 21 years. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting a series on the project, from inception through implementation to release. I feel proud at my accomplishment – within one month I managed to prepare all the data, render and store it on Amazon Web Services, and develop a simple framework for animating a tile-based web map. I hope to be able to detail the process so that others may be able to do the same. If you have not done so already, please check out the report’s website and leave feedback and questions in the comments below. I’ll try to answer any questions about the projects in the subsequent posts.

Posted in Data, Google Maps, Planning, Visualization, Web Mapping | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap

Posted on July 7, 2010 by John Reiser

ESRI has just released an add-in for ArcGIS 10 allowing ArcGIS users to download data from and contribute to OpenStreetMap. Marten Hogeweg announced the tool and news spread pretty quickly. While I agree with the favorable reception the tool has received, it’s still in need of work. Having said that, I must also say that this is the first tool I’ve come across that reliably downloads OSM data into a geodatabase based on a user-defined extent. Coupled with a basic symbology tool, it provides very easy access to OSM data. The average GIS user is not one that is necessarily comfortable with XML-formatted data; they want “a shapefile” and this tool delivers that. The retrieval by extent functionality is very important – in a state like New Jersey where we have 566 small municipalities, a GIS user in a borough or even a county would be inclined to download just their area of interest. The statewide shapefile downloads provided by CloudMade left something to be desired.

While the download functionality is pretty straightforward, the workflow to contribute edits back to OSM is a little convoluted. I’ll take you through the process as I downloaded a portion of Rowan University’s campus and updated OSM with some recent changes on campus. First, I opened a new map document, added in the 2007 aerial photography (for reference) and set my coordinate system to NJ State Plane in feet.

Getting Started

Starting out with the bare minimum is worth commenting on. All you need to get started is a geodatabase. The tool will even create the feature dataset in which the point, line and polygon feature classes are stored. I created a file geodatabase and started the “Download and Symbolize OSM” model, which does pretty much what it says.
Download and Symbolize OSM Data dialog in ArcGIS 10

Download and Symbolize OSM Data

With both the Download tool and the Download & Symbolize model, you can specify an extent and the tool will only retrieve data intersecting or contained by that bounding box. The script allows you to work in your native projection system, as the extent values are converted into WGS 84 coordinates. You then specify a name for your new feature dataset (different from most 9.3 tools, where the tool expects it to already exist) and the names for three symbology layers.
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Posted in ESRI, In the News, OpenStreetMap, Tools and Scripts | 3 Comments

ArcGIS available on the iPhone

Posted on July 6, 2010 by John Reiser
ArcGIS on the iPhone

ArcGIS on the iPhone

ESRI has released ArcGIS for iPhone. It’s now available through the App Store. It’s an iPad/iPhone app, so it should work well on both. I just tried it out on my iPhone, and it’s pretty snappy. The data loads quickly and the interface is clean. There are many layers already available through the app, such as OpenStreetMap.

I like the support for ArcGIS Server, as we will be able to provide our local data to iPhone users. I hope that a later revision will also support WMS, as there are many more free and useful WMS-based services out there than ArcGIS services. Greater support for GPS would be useful. ArcGIS for iPhone can locate you using the embedded GPS, but I don’t believe you can use the GPS to record features. I believe these features will come. James Fee points out that ESRI’s response to the UC FAQ regarding iOS support is positive, claiming that updates will feature editing and geoprocessing. As much as I prefer to edit on a big, widescreen monitor, it would be nice to update my data on the go.

If you have an iPhone or iPad, download it for free from the App Store and check it out.

Posted in ESRI, OpenStreetMap, Technology | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Projects featured on Rowan’s home page

Posted on July 5, 2010 by John Reiser

I’m proud to say that I now have two articles written about my work that have been featured on the Rowan University home page.

Mapping the Guard - view of tank

Most recently, Mapping the Guard (still on the home page) was posted, detailing the great work performed by students for the New Jersey National Guard. I’m very pleased to be heading up this internship program, because I feel that the students leaving the program will be excellent candidates for GIS positions. The students are learning about SDSFIE and other data schema, how to edit data in a multi-user environment, and working with web-based GIS services.

Way back when I was still an adjunct, Mapping the Campus in Layers was written. It’s a good read, because now that I’m at the University full time, I’ve worked to put the pieces together so that we can do much more.

Check back within two weeks about one of the projects we’re working on now. It might not be front-page material, but I’m sure you’ll find it interesting.

Posted in Data, New Jersey State Atlas, Teaching, Technology, Web Mapping | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

More on Apple’s mishandling of geotagged photos

Posted on July 5, 2010 by John Reiser

In my previous post, I claimed that iPhoto was the culprit behind the mangling of the GPS coordinates embedded in my photographs. The problem likely lies in the Core Image library used throughout Mac OS X.
To see if other image editing applications exhibited the same geotagging flaw, I used a jpg right off of my camera and rotated and saved it in Preview, Apple’s default image viewer. This demonstration shows that the method used to write .jpg files alters the GPS coordinates stored in the EXIF metadata. Continue reading →

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