Mapping the Afghan War Diary

Jan 242013
 

The Afghan War Diary, made avail­able by the Wik­ileaks group, is the dis­clo­sure of inter­nal US Mil­i­tary logs. Wik­ileaks has been known to release data that con­tains lat­i­tu­di­nal and lon­gi­tu­di­nal infor­ma­tion use­ful for spa­tial analy­sis. I’ve taken the lib­erty to map the some-76,000 mil­i­tary logs.

The mil­i­tary logs are a col­lec­tion of top secret clas­si­fied cor­re­spon­dences that detail var­i­ous mil­i­tary encoun­ters and sit­u­a­tional reports. Some of the most pop­u­lar head­ings in the log are: ene­mies killed/wounded in action, friend­lies killed/wounded in action and report­ing unit (squad/other).

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An ESRI mapbook submission that never was

Nov 202012
 

It has been a while since I posted on this web­site; but you may have noticed that I have been fairly busy else­where, such as on LinkedIn or Twit­ter.

This post will stand as a reminder to myself that we can’t always fore­see the bumps along the road. I am speak­ing about the ESRI map­book sub­mis­sion that was due on Novem­ber 16, which I missed because of undue dif­fi­cul­ties in obtain­ing and manip­u­lat­ing triv­ial data. Why do I say triv­ial? Given the way my sub­mis­sion looks at the moment, I would say it is accept­able, if not near per­fect for the map­book cat­e­gories of trans­porta­tion and cartography.

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Public Transit Service Density: The Case of the TTC

Apr 272012
 

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.

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Census-Driven Maps is live!

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.

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Toronto OpenStreetMap Hack Weekend

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.

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Alternatives to Google Maps

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.

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Control Layer Opacity with jQueryUI Sliders

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 »

Visualizing the Canadian Crime Severity Index

Sep 292011
 

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 »

The Growth of Costco in the USA

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 »

Extent of Snow Cover in Canada (2007)

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 »

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