Global Connectivity Revisited; mapping out 58,288 flight routes

Sep 042011
 

I guess we can call this part two of the global con­nec­tiv­ity by flight exper­i­ment, which I have been work­ing on the past cou­ple of days. Once again, the data comes from openflights.org/data.html and is avail­able for free to the pub­lic. It is a very detailed set of data that requires just a lit­tle bit of mas­sag­ing to be usable in a desk­top work envi­ron­ment. In this blog post I would like to take you through some quick help­ful tips that should get you from down­load­ing the data and clean­ing it up to map­ping it in ArcMap. In all hon­esty, I would have loved Con­tinue reading »

Using OpenStreetMap Data - P.2

Aug 222011
 

Lets talk about QGIS for a lit­tle bit before we go ahead and install it on our sys­tems. QGIS is an open source GIS pack­age that is under the GNU pub­lic license. It offers enough func­tion­al­ity for some­one with a ArcInfo Stu­dent License (myself) to want to explore. The usage of QGIS in day to day tasks has me spend­ing less time Con­tinue reading »

Using OpenStreetMap Data - P.1

Aug 212011
 

I can think back and remem­ber strug­gling with being able to uti­lize Open­StreetMap (OSM) data in a project of mine. I wanted a free source of infor­ma­tion and geospa­tial data, where I was not bound to strict and lim­it­ing copy­rights. Open­StreetMap offered a one-stop-shop for free and open geospa­tial data. At the time, I was most inter­ested in uti­liz­ing their very detailed road net­work. How­ever, I ran into many hic­cups along the way, which ulti­mately deterred me from com­plet­ing the project. Some time has passed and I have returned to said Con­tinue reading »