MAC URISA and posts from the conference

Posted on October 4, 2010 by John Reiser

I’ll be at MAC URISA in Atlantic City from the 4th until the 6th. On the 4th, I’ll be conducting a introductory-level workshop on Distributed GIS. On Tuesday the 5th, John Hasse and I will be at the Interactive Expo presenting our “Changing Landscapes” report and interactive maps. Wednesday the 6th, I’ll just be enjoying the conference. The materials from the conference will be available on my presentations page.

I decided to finally hop on the Tumblr bandwagon. I’ll be using it to post pictures and short notes while on-the-go. To me, Tumblr seems like a good middle ground between blogging and tweeting, and that’s how I’ll be using it. My Tumblr blog is at notes.njgeo.org or njgeo.tumblr.com. My most recent posts (tumbls?) will also show up in the sidebar of this blog. Look for updates from the conference and if you’re planning on attending, make sure to say hello!

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Unmoderated communities aren’t communities.

Posted on September 29, 2010 by John Reiser

Without a fear of social repercussions for anti-social behavior, online communities without moderation often devolve into a cesspool. Take for instance InsiderPages, a hybrid yellow pages with reviews. There are countless sites like this out there, all suffering from the fact that bizarre and often inflammatory comments may include keywords that bump the site higher in search rankings. There’s no real incentive to police the comments, which gives us gems like this:

InsiderPages users’ thoughts on the Cowtown Rodeo Flea Market.

Despite the term “flea market” the Cowtown Rodeo’s market isn’t a low place. It’s an outdoor swap meet that caters to the agrarian marketplace of Salem County. However, the first few comments on the listing are an argument over our current president’s stance on immigration. Completely irrelevant discussion, yet it remains there. NJ.com is perhaps one of the biggest offenders; leaving downright profane comments on race at the bottom of many articles. Without moderation, the comments become something else entirely; anti-social outlets for the individuals and a bump in SEO rankings for the site. A losing situation for anyone looking for unbiased information.

I’m sure not all of the sites are gaming SEO through comments; some may be simply understaffed. On the other hand, when you consider the time individuals waste in the innumerable echo chambers like this one, the mind boggles. God bless America.

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Location-based services may be a hard sell.

Posted on September 26, 2010 by John Reiser
Google Latitude logo

Google Latitude, not overwhelmingly adopted

I’m working on a few concepts for integrating GPS locations received from mobile browsers into our mapping applications. One idea has been to employ the location of a student’s smartphone by placing them on the campus map and identifying the quickest route to their on-campus destination. While location-based services have been a hot topic for the past two years now, I’m still unsure of how readily the non-technical public will accept the concept. I still have GIS students that find the amount of data accessible to them intimidating and “scary.”

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Posted in Data, Google, Privacy, Technology, Web Mapping | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

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 →

Posted in Data, Technology, Web Mapping | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

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 , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

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