Welcome to the second issue of Spatial Awareness, a regular editorial focused on the maps and the spa

June 23 · Issue #2 · View online

Welcome to the second issue of Spatial Awareness, a regular editorial focused on the maps and the spatial community. Each issue I’ll highlight the most interesting and inspiring things that I’ve found — cool demos, new tools, tutorials, beautiful maps, interviews, behind-the-scenes and more.

It’s been a week since the first issue was released , and what a week it’s been! The response from the community has taken me completely by surprise — far beyond my wildest expectations. When I originally came up with the idea for this newsletter I had a long-term goal of getting to 100 subscribers, with a handful of people providing active feedback and content suggestions. At the time of writing this issue we have 635 subscribers from all areas of the community, and what feels like a small army of amazing people suggesting content for future issues. Perhaps we can reach the goal of creating a nice little spatial community sooner than expected. I hope so. I want to to thank you all for the kind words and constructive feedback. These issues take a lot of time and effort to pull together and your enthusiasm and encouragement is everything I need to keep this going long term. 😊 So as always, sit back and join me on this periodic journey through the world of maps. And remember, you can unsubscribe at any point if you’re not finding this useful. All I ask from you is that if you enjoy this issue then please share it with your friends and colleagues . The more people we can get involved, the better this will be. Hopefully I can do something special once we reach 1,000 people. One last thing — you can reply directly to me via this email if you have content suggestions, questions, or just want to say hi. Lots of you did this last week and I replied to every single one of you. Don’t be shy! 👋 — Robin ( @robhawkes

Maps

StoryMap of 68 map projections storymaps-nextgen.arcgis.com – Share Hugely exciting? Perhaps not. Still, this well-presented roundup of map projections is both interesting and useful all at the same time.

Odds and ends

OpenStreetMap discuss terminating Facebook's right to use it lists.openstreetmap.org – Share After systematically failing to attribute OpenStreetMap in their maps, Facebook may be given notice of their breach of the ODbL licence. The resulting discussion on the OSM mailing list is both long and interesting, highlighting how the issue of attribution goes far beyond Facebook and isn’t something that’s easily solved.

OGC publishes results from Vector Tiles pilot www.opengeospatial.org – Share The Open Geospatial Consortium are currently looking at creating a specification for the encoding and publishing of vector tiles. As things stand, this specification will be based upon the Mapbox Vector Tiles specification. It’s as yet unclear what impact this will have on the development of Version 3 of the MVT spec.

Software and tools

trip-simulator v2.1.0 twitter.com – Share SharedStreets have updated their tool for generating simulated raw GPS telemetry. The new features support simulating vehicle shift changes and random vehicle hardware failure mid trip. I’ve been itching to try this tool out, if only for the pretty visualisations.

harp.gl developer.here.com – Share A brand new WebGL-powered 3D mapping framework has been released by HERE. It’s based on Three.js and Mapbox Vector Tiles. It’s also open source and released under the Apache License. It’s nice to see another mapping framework using Three.js, the same engine that powers the ViziCities project I started over 6 years ago. Perhaps before its time.

qgis2web github.com – Share Did you know that you can export a map from QGIS to Open Layers or Leaflet? How? By using qgis2web! This great plugin, and its sibling web2qgis , are created and maintained by Tom Chadwin . He’s currently looking for code contributions on qgis2web to add a Mapbox GL JS export option.

CesiumJS 1.57, with up to 10x faster 3D Tiles cesium.com – Share The recent release of Cesium 1.57 has added a whole bunch of improvements, one of the most exciting being a dramatic improvement in performance of 3D Tiles. The linked article covers how they achieved this from a technical perspective. Nice!

Over $300,000 raised for development of OpenLayers 6 github.com – Share OpenLayers is used and loved by a huge number of people in the spatial community. Recently a series of work for OpenLayers 6 took place to add WebGL support by using a Mapbox GL JS layer, the funding of which was initiated by Swisstopo . All in all, over $300,000 was raised and Swisstopo themselves placed a cool $150,000 into the fund.

Articles

Cities start to regret single-family zoning www.nytimes.com – Share I came for the maps, I stayed for the story. This article from the New York Times provides insight in to a growing zoning issue in the US — there’s just simply too many lots dedicated to single-family housing.

Visualising tsunamis is all about capturing cause and effect medium.com – Share This map of tsunamis in Google Earth visualises both the cause and effects of these (mostly) natural disasters. The article contains a detailed write-up of how they collected and manipulated the data to create the maps.

Mapping mistake allowed a billionaire to win over the poor www.propublica.org – Share Take an obscure development law and combine it with misaligned polygons. And what do you get? A way to divert tax breaks that were meant to help the poor. It’s hard to believe that this was even allowed to happen in the first place.

Data

New Zealand releases 10s of thousands of old aerial photographs natlib.govt.nz – Share The National Library and Alexander Turnbull Library in New Zealand have released nearly 50,000 old aerial photographs, free to use under a CC-BY licence. I’m yet to dig through them all (is that even possible?) but no doubt these will be of interest for historical mapping.

Netherlands building data in PostgreSQL and GeoPackage formats 3dbag.bk.tudelft.nl – Share Delft University of Technology has helped pull together GeoPackage and PostgreSQL downloads for 3D building data in the Netherlands. Building quality is LOD1, which are effectively extruded polygons.

Events

British Cartographic Society & Society of Cartographers Annual Conference www.eventbrite.co.uk – Share The 2019 British Cartographic Society and Society of Cartographers Annual Conference — try saying that 5 times without tripping up — is happening at the Ordnance Survey HQ this September (11—12th). Are you going? Let me know as I’ll be attending and I’d love to say hi. I’m also on the panel discussing visualisation vs. cartography.

Calling for nominees for the OpenStreetMap Awards 2019 blog.openstreetmap.org – Share Have you been working on a project that uses OSM data and was announced after June 2018? Submit it for this year’s OSM Awards, with the winners being announced at State of the Map in Germany in September.

Are there events happening in your area? I’m only able to highlight events that I know of so please inform me of events happening in your local area or country. Either reply to this email or contact me on Twitter

Jobs

I want to say a big thank you to @programmerpunk for tirelessly passing on spatial jobs for the newsletter. If you know of any roles that are related to the spatial industry then let me know so I can include them in a future issue.

Senior GIS Technician — Nature Conservancy careers.nature.org – Share The Nature Conservancy are looking for a senior technician with experience of the Esri stack to work on GIS systems architecture in support of their conservation work.

PhD Positions in Geospatial AI for Disaster Management (Japan) www.grss-ieee.org – Share Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology are looking for PhD candidates to work on geospatial AI for disaster management. Research topics include AI and Deep Learning, amongst others.

Who to follow

Carl Churchill (@Cchurchili) twitter.com – Share I discovered Carl’s work on Twitter quite recently and immediately loved it. He’s prolific and has produced loads of beautiful maps. He’s also a student at Arizona State University. It’s criminal that he only has 33 followers on Twitter — I think we can fix that for him.

Who inspires you from the community? I can only highlight the people that I’m aware of, so get in touch if you have someone you admire in the community who deserves some recognition. You can reply to this email or contact me on Twitter

Community space

The Spatial Community thespatialcommunity.org – Share If you want somewhere to talk in real-time with other spatial folk then I recommend you check out The Spatial Community on Slack. There are just over 4,500 people there, spread across a variety of domain-specific channels.

Women in Geospatial twitter.com – Share Not only an account to follow for interesting spatial content, their primary focus is as a professional network to promote gender equality in the spatial industry.

Spatial Awareness is on Slack

I’ve set up a Slack chat for the Spatial Awareness community to talk maps and help shape future issues of the newsletter. Please join if you’d like to be part of that community and have a direct channel of communication with me. I’ll also be sharing early access to issues with a select group who are happy to help me proofread and generally double-check things. We’ve already got a small group of people signed up. You can join here — I’m looking forward to seeing you there too.

That's a wrap

And again, the issue is over already. I’m still not committing to a firm schedule yet but the aim is to keep these coming on a regular basis. I managed a weekly update this time, though we’ll find out soon if I’m able to continue that momentum. As I said at the start, your energy and enthusiasm really helps give me the motivation to write these issues. Please keep it coming. So what do you think? What did you like? What didn’t you like? Don’t forget to reply to this email if you have any feedback, suggestions for content or just want to say hi. You can also reach me on Twitter , where I’m usually posting all sorts of interesting spatial-related stuff. See you in the next one.

Did you enjoy this issue?

If you don't want these updates anymore, please unsubscribe here If you were forwarded this newsletter and you like it, you can subscribe here

Powered by Revue