As the City of Toronto inches closer and closer towards the green light for new Metrolinx projects like the LRT lines for Sheppard East and Eglinton Crosstown, GIS will play an ever crucial role in assisting decision makers by framing City-wide issues into a perspective that can be quickly comprehended. Mapping service density aims to identify transit deserts in the overall transit network. These maps emphasize the difference in the levels of service (number of trips) by using darker/stronger colours and thicker lines for higher than average trips, and vice-versa for routes that display below the average number of trips.
Apr 262012
Let’s face it, GIS is a term loosely (if even that) understood by the public. Without a university degree in Geography or certificate in GIS, web-mapping enables users to explore geospatial data, patterns and phenomenon quite effectively. As an exploratory tool, web-mapping bridges the gap between the analytical engine that is the GIS software, and the basic static map.
Mar 212012
The OpenStreetMap project has over half a million map contributors and a fairly extensive developer community. This past weekend, the first-ever OpenStreetMap hack weekend was held in Toronto, Canada (second-ever North American hack) at Ryerson University. This event was jointly hosted with the Department of Geography, Master of Spatial Analysis and the Student Association of Geographic Analysis. Event coördination was taken care of by Richard Weait, long-time advocate of OpenStreetMap.
Mar 102012
Late last year, Google announced that their Maps API and Google Maps Imagery would become a charged service for high volume users. Anyone hosting more than 25,000 daily map views would incur charges according to this pricing scheme. It is important to note that, not only is the API restricted, but the imagery (google maps layers) is restricted in the same fashion. For those that use any other API but still call upon Google base layers, the restriction of 25,000 daily map views still holds true. Now, this website certainly won’t generate that kind of traffic anytime in the near future, but there certainly are those kinds of websites on the internet that have well over a million page views a day. Those that first come to mind are travel service providers and real-estate agencies. Both services use maps as spatial decision support tools (eg. where should I live? where should we visit?). I am taking this opportunity to round up the APIs that I am familiar with and would recommend to those making the move away from Google.
Feb 072012
It’s been a while since I last posted on my blog! Very excited to be back =D. The fall university semester went by quickly due to an onslaught of projects, tests and my undergraduate thesis, which I am proud to say that I survived and completed with honours. This semester I started working for Dr. Claus Rinner (my thesis supervisor) on a web mapping application that utilizes some of the data from my thesis. All in all, a busy year for me at the university!
Today I would like to take some time and introduce the power of jQuery, specifically the UI slider element. Continue reading »
Working with the Crime Severity Index has been an interesting exercise. The data are available through Statistics Canada, which tracks police-reported crime severity as well as the volume of reported crimes. The Crime Severity Index offers a secondary measure that helps us to understand more about the crimes committed per Province. Generally speaking, severity of crime is not correlated with the volume of crime committed, but there are certainly some outliers. We inherit the inability to determine whether or not these correlations actually prove to be true when studying data aggregated to such a large (Provincial) extent. Continue reading »
Sep 262011
Not unlike other superstores around the world, Costco’s presence has had somewhat of a profound impact on our consumeristic lives. The ability to purchase goods at larger than normal quantities, sometimes well below average retail value, makes it an attractive shopping experience. The first Costco opened in San Diego, California, 1976. It’s growth shows wildfire-like spread throughout the United States west coast. It is only in the mid-to-late 90’s which show remarkable expansion of Costco locations to central and eastern United States.. Continue reading »
Sep 232011
Sometimes we stumble upon interesting things and we don’t necessarily know how we should use what we have just found. A series of maps; snow cover in Canada was an interesting find but not really all that useful for any of my personal projects. However, I eventually came back to it when I realized that not all geovisualizations occur within a GIS environment. Continue reading »
Sep 202011
There exists many methods for geovisualization of spatial phenomena. As talked about a few weeks ago, population density can be mapped out using cartograms, or by other more classical methods, such as the chloropleth and dot density techniques. Another method is shown below, whereby population density is explored as a 3-dimensional polygon extrusion. This has been completed using ArcGlobe with ESRI basic world population-by-state data. Have a look at the video below! Continue reading »
Sep 192011
Open, free and public. Three terms, which when appearing before the word “GIS” make geographers feel all warm and fuzzy (I think?). Geospatial data can be very costly, but free alternatives may be suitable, if not as useful, as their expensive counterparts. Therefore, its worthwhile knowing what data is available for public consumption. I have compiled a list of the open GIS data resources that I frequently make use of in my personal projects. Hopefully they become as useful to you, as they are to me. Continue reading »