G A N I S » Online Mapping

Mapping For Justice

Ted Hildebrandt — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:13:36 +0000

Check out this great blog highlights a project developed by the Tutor/Mentor Connection to “creates maps that look at the relationship among poverty, community resources, school performance, and locations of non-school tutoring/mentoring facilities for K-12 students.”

Mapping For Justice

Canadian Census Maps

Ted Hildebrandt — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 15:26:32 +0000

This is something new from Statistics Canada today.

The Atlas of Canada, produced by Natural Resources Canada in partnership with Statistics Canada, presents a series of maps and accompanying analysis of national and regional data results from the 2006 Census. The first releases focus on Canadian population, age, marital status, immigration, visible minorities and mode of transportation. The maps are available on the Atlas of Canada website (http://atlas.nrcan.gc.ca/site/english/featureditems/index.html).

Future releases will cover topics such as educational attainment, the labour force, languages, housing and income.

Visible Minority Population 2006

Crime Heatmaps From the BBC

Ted Hildebrandt — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:55:03 +0000

Cool Infographics points to a nice GIS page on the BBC which shows crime data for the city of Oxford using heatmaps to map various crime patterns over a one year period. Check it out.

Mapping for Health Advocates

Ted Hildebrandt — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:30:26 +0000

The Opportunity Agenda, with support from the Health Policy Institute at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, commissioned a series of papers that explore best practices for integrating maps into health advocacy, using case studies to present key strategies for effective use and overcoming technical hurdles.

Using Maps to Promote Health Equity

RoundUp of Google Maps-based Mapmaking Apps

Ted Hildebrandt — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 16:33:57 +0000

Webware has the list here.

From the article:

“Google Maps is dynamic. Making customized maps through the service isn’t very difficult. But there are a variety of third-party tools on the Web that help you create fully customized Google Maps mashups. From Flickr geotag integration to wedding event mapping to just doodling, you can do it all.”

Pilot Atlas of the Risk of Homelessness

Ted Hildebrandt — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 14:06:46 +0000

Check out this new resource. Pretty cool. My good friend Tracey was one of the persons involved in making this a reality. As she says in her blog posting on this:

The Atlas will soon be going live and I hope it starts a conversation between geographers, geomaticians, data providers and colleagues and front line workers in the social sector. We discovered that you have to mortgage the house to purchase data to study homelessness at a national scale in this country! Surely, that cannot be the sign of a democracy!

Pilot Atlas of the Risk of Homelessness

Executive Summary

The Pilot Cybercartographic Atlas of Risk of Homelessness is the first national and city scale mapping endeavour that represents risk of homelessness data in an interactive fashion using timelines, different scales and associated text and charts including regional and local scales. The Pilot Atlas of the Risk of Homelessness renders in maps and interactive graphs well defined and accepted Canadian risk indicators such as vacancy rates and rental markets, rent geared to income units, families spending 50% of their income on rent and housing starts. When these indicators are visualized in an engaging manner readers can more readily distinguish trends, patterns and issues that cannot be conveyed in static data tables. Atlas modules include the visualization of indicators across time at three scales: Canada, 23 municipalities and 3 featured cities/metropolitan areas. The City of Toronto provides data to show their aging social housing stock; poverty and the disproportionate spending on rent are explored in City of Calgary neighbourhoods while la Communauté métropolitaine de Montréal (CMM) tells the story of social housing and housing affordability for lower-income renting populations. An interactive GraphoMap shows Vacancy rates, housing starts, and 50%+ spent on rent for 24 cities at three time points while the Canada map shows the rate of change between renters and owners over time. A map of Canada shows the rate of change between renters and owners and clearly demonstrates data issues associated with Canada’s ever changing and incompatible statistical geographic units.

The Atlas is intended as a pilot to demonstrate to a variety of stakeholders that cartographers, geographers and subject matter specialists can work together to create engaging, understandable and useful visual content representing the structural issues of homelessness in Canada. Modules are created with stakeholders so that they may use these to inform public policy. The Atlas is designed using the Nunaliit Cybercartographic Atlas Framework which is an open source software designed at the GCRC specifically to ensure that others can add content to it. For example, a research group, a community group or other cities may have data they have collected during the course of their work or research that could easily be rendered into maps of this kind and be added as a module. This is a living Atlas created specifically for that purpose – to continuously expand on this story and to disseminate the data in a way that is easily understandable. The Atlas could expand to include not only risk of homelessness data but also population health and homelessness, absolute homelessness and housing themes along the continuum of homelessness. Finally, access to and cost of public statistical data were considered barriers to the creation of some content, especially in the social sector.

Geocoding Gone Wild…

Ted Hildebrandt — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 02:14:09 +0000

I came across this article that shows what can happen when you don’t get it all right. To quote…

The Los Angeles Police Department is battling a virtual crime wave in downtown L.A. caused by an Internet map coding error.

If the department’s online crime map is to be believed, one might thing that a downtown location just a block from the LAPD’s new headquarters is the most crime-ridden place in the city. In the past six months, that location experienced 1,380 crimes–4 percent of all crimes mapped–or roughly eight a day.

The crimes were real, but a coding error with the system’s geocoding–the process of converting addresses into map points–caused the crimes to be represented at a default location, according to a report Sunday in the Los Angeles Times. The mistake caused many crimes to be mapped miles away from their actual locations, causing false trends to be reported while masking real ones, according to the report.

You can read the full story here

Google Earth Canadian Elections Map

Ted Hildebrandt — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 14:38:02 +0000

Cedric Sam has created a Google Earth map application of all Canadian ridings as they were represented when Parliament dissolved and shows a variety of information, such as election history by riding and some Pie charts represent vote shares at the last general election. You can read about the details of how he put together this application on his blog.

Google Earth / Élection fédérale 2008 au Canada / 2008 Federal Election in Canada

Toronto Star Map Blog

Ted Hildebrandt — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 19:50:36 +0000

The Toronto Star now has a blog dedicated to highlighting a “Map of the Week”. These maps are not necessarily linked to particular stories, although that might happen along the way. They are using Google Maps as their base. Check out their Gratuitous Map of Canada’s Olympic Athletes hometowns or Urban Bees.

Growth of Walmart Across America

Ted Hildebrandt — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:17:03 +0000

Here is a cool animation from FlowingData showing how Walmart has spread across the United States over time.

Click on the image above to view the animation.