Category Archives: Data

Stamen Map Tiles now a paid service

Understandably, the awesome map tiles produced by Stamen Design over 10 years ago have been moved to Stadia and are now a paid service. I have extensively used the Toner Labels service as annotation to aerial photography and as a … Continue reading

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Broken libraries? Docker to the rescue!

I’m working on some spatial data, loading shapefiles into PostgreSQL on an older server of mine. Revisiting my previous blog post, I wanted to review more recent NJ Land Use/Land Cover data with the 2002 LULC data I imported to … Continue reading

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Meandering Meetings and Open Data

I love meetings. When the right people are in the room, with a clear agenda and desire to work together towards a common goal, magic can happen. Ideas are put out there and refined as a group, and an action … Continue reading

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Using Tableau to visualize land use change

I was home sick on Wednesday, so while I was on the couch I decided to dive into Tableau Public, a free desktop visualization tool. At IERP, we use Tableau for some of our public dashboards. Other than some minor … Continue reading

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Unix Philosophy

Often, when I go to tackle a problem, I look to use the simplest tools available first. Unix (and its derivatives/descendants, like Mac OS X and Linux) was designed with the following principles in mind: Write programs that do one … Continue reading

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Generating row and column IDs for a hexagon grid

Recently when working on a project that uses a hexagon grid, I used the awesome mmqgis plugin to QGIS to produce the grid. The one small shortcoming with the tool is that I would prefer to have a cell identifier … Continue reading

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Insignificant Spaces

Yesterday, I mentioned that I discovered ArcGIS’s inconsistent handling of spaces within text fields. Today, I tested to see how ArcGIS handles NULLs, Empty Strings and Spaces within its native file formats.

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Key issue with New Jersey’s parcel data

I’ve been working on a project to visualize differences between assessed value and levied taxes in New Jersey and I discovered a bug in some of New Jersey’s parcel data. New Jersey uses “PAMS_PIN” as a key between the GIS … Continue reading

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Mitch Hedberg and GIS

So, a recent post on Reddit highlighted a Mitch Hedberg joke. “La Quinta” is Spanish for “next to Denny’s.” Thinking about this, I realized we could use GIS to find the number of La Quintas that are next to Denny’s. … Continue reading

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Using a TMS in JOSM’s Download Data window

Now that our crowdsourced update to New Jersey’s land use map has had some serious contributions – we’re just shy of 20,000 user-contributed points of new (2007-2012) urbanization – I realized that many of these locations are in need of … Continue reading

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