Today I want to recommend a book I have been reading on and off over a long time. It’s the book On The Map – Why the World Looks the Way it Does by Simon Garfield. It’s a book about the history of maps and cartography, starting with the ancient Greeks to the online maps of today. It covers topics like the history of atlases, the story on how the South Pole was discovered without maps, the history of the Mercator projection and much more. I have the hardcover version, and it is a beautiful book with many illustrations and good paper quality. It is well written and never boring (at least not for me). It can be read from start to end like I’m doing, or you can go straight for any of the chapters as they are all individual stories that can be read by themselves. That has made it possible for me to read a chapter, leave it for months and then read the next chapter. I am not fully done with it, but I look forward to read the last chapters soon.
Category: GIS Christmas 2015
Here are my GIS Christmas calendar posts from 2015.
GIS Christmas calendar – day 3
How do you share a location when that place doesn’t have an address? A grid with coordinates is an old and well working system, but coordinates are hard to remember in the head unless you write them down.
Now someone has come up with a new and interesting system called What3words. They have divided the earth into a grid of 3×3 meter squares and given each square 3 words that become the address of this square. One benefit of this is that also places in the world without a street address gets an address. It’s easy to say and remember 3 words, and with squares of 3x3m the addresses are more accurate than normal addresses. Now several map services support what3word addresses, like the Norwegian national mapping authorities map of Norway. I’m not sure if this will take off as a way to share a location, today it’s already relatively easy to share a map link to Google Maps or similar. And most smartphones for sale now has gps built in, so the exact location can be found. But still, an interesting idea.
Here is my location (the middle square of those that cover the small apartment I live in:
GIS Christmas calendar – day 2
Google Earth Pro
Google Earth is nothing new, but did you know that Google Earth Pro now is free to anyone? In the pro version you can record videos of your “trips” around the world with the included film maker, print in high resolution for use in presentations or reports, and import GIS data like Tiff files or shapefiles.
On Wikipedia a GIS – geographical information system is defined as a “system designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present all types of spatial or geographical data.” So by this definition even the standard version of Google Earth can be considered a GIS (if a simple one). But with the possibility to import GIS data as is possible with the pro version Google Earth becomes much more of a useful tool for gis/map work and presentation of data. The idea of being able to make a film where you fly to a location and see your work on top of the virtual globe is very appealing to me, as opening up ArcGIS to show someone a map or just some data is not particularly fast.
A simple example is something I did on the train the last time I was travelling by train. As I happened to have data on Norway from OpenStreetMap (downloaded from Geofabrik) I could import the railways into G.Earth Pro and see the track between the 3D mountains.
Click on the images to see them bigger
A small tip: I often use the shortcut “R” (just the letter r) while navigating in G. Earth. This shortcut resets the compass direction and viewing angle, so that the north again is up and the angle straight down on the terrain. It’s much easier and faster than changing the angle back with the navigation buttons or by dragging the map.
GIS Christmas 2015 – day 1
The GIS Christmas calendar is back!
Two years ago I did a GIS Christmas calendar with a post every day until Christmas about GIS or maps. This year I will do the same, but be a little broader on the subjects of the posts, and also include posts about geography. It will mostly be posts with links to things from my big bookmark archive, but also some personal work on some days.
As the climate meeting is happening in Paris this week I would like to start with a few beautiful tools to visualise global climate.
Earth
This is a visualization of global weather conditions forecast by supercomputers, with a lot of variables that can be changed by clicking on the earth button. As default it shows the wind at the surface, but many other layers can be turned on as overlays. One cool feature is the possibility to change to a different map projection.
Windyty
This second website is based on the above, but has a different and in my opinion simpler interface with a timeline and a location search box so that it is a little easier to find the weather conditions at your own location.