Currently viewing the category: "geodata"

Using MapShaper to Create Smaller Shapefiles and KML through Finder!

On May 24, 2008 By Sean Gorman

We’ve been doing a lot of data migration and new data uploads with Finder! and often times our data team runs into data and mapping headaches. One that we commonly encounter are largish shapefiles that make for really bloated KML when we convert it (for instance a 2mb shapefile for US counties becomes [...]

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Power Law Distributions of Google Indexed KML: Is the Long Tail the Wrong Tail for the GeoWeb

On April 29, 2008 By Sean Gorman

We made the cross country hop out to Santa Clara to attend Location Intelligence today. The weather is awesome and we just finished the morning workshops. I sat in on Lior Ron and David Minogue’s talk on “Searching the GeoWeb“.

The talk produced many interesting insights on Google’s approach to searching geodata, but one [...]

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Virtual Earth vs. Google MyMaps KML Support

On April 26, 2008 By Sean Gorman

As we’ve been putting GeoCommons through its paces I’ve been testing KML files we generate in different applications. The most interesting comparison by far has been between Virtual Earth and Google MyMaps. I did a high level comparison of the two plus Yahoo! MapMixer a few blog posts back, but after testing several KML [...]

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GeoCommons Metadata Implementation Screenshots

On April 22, 2008 By Sean Gorman

We got such useful feedback from the last metadata post I thought I would add some screen shots of how it is starting to come together. Unfortunately we were not able to get all the suggestions in because of the time crunch hitting our release date, but please keep posting the feedback and [...]

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Links List 4.18.08

On April 18, 2008 By Sean Gorman

Moxie designed a demonstration to show how integrated geo spatial service, RIA technology, location based service and digital mapa can make life easier. From that, a geo spatial service was developed that enabled Flex Yahoo AS3 map application.

Virtual Earth has been updated to include new imagery, new [...]

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Hierarchy or Folksonomy? Is there a Hybrid between Order and Chaos

On April 15, 2008 By Sean Gorman

When we started the very first iteration of GeoCommons in 2005 folksonomies were all the rage and we jumped on board using tags to organize the geospatial data that was pushed into the new platform. During the time we had the prototype deployed we ran into many of the same issues other applications have found [...]

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Links List 4.11.08

On April 11, 2008 By Sean Gorman

Brett Taylor says that we need a Wikipedia for data. He realizes how hard it is for a everyday programmer to get access to even the most basic factual data, which is a barrier to innovation.

Dave Bouwman shows us the National Geographic MetaLens service with Virtual Earth. MetaLens is a geospatial [...]

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Map Creation Apps – Google vs. Microsoft vs. Yahoo

On April 9, 2008 By Sean Gorman

I promised Andrew a comparison of the big three map creation applications by feature and functionality, so here it goes. The story of how lightweight web based map creation applications came to be is interesting in and of itself. I think looking at how the three applications evolved historically will provide a bit of [...]

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GeoWeb Metadata Follow Up

On April 2, 2008 By Sean Gorman

First off want to thanks the folk that commented on the last post. Lots of useful feedback and it also highlighted a bit of confusion I created with the first post. The purpose of the first post was not a proposal to create a new metadata standard. Instead it was simply a proposal of how [...]

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A Proposal for a GeoWeb Metadata Implementation

On April 1, 2008 By Sean Gorman

One of the criticisms we received when we launched GeoCommons was the lack of metadata for the content we had collected. Since then we’ve been looking into what would be a reasonable approach to implement metadata for the GeoWeb.

When it comes to GIS data the existing standard is the FGDC’s Content Standard for [...]

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