Stop Waiting for Permission. Three years later, concerned about the dire straits faced by the education system in Philadelphia, I showed up at an EdTech hackathon. By this time, we had an active local Code for America “Brigade,” Code for Philly, who sponsored the event. I worked as a designer on a dynamic d3 chart with my teammate, a developer that happened to be one of the Brigade’s co-captains. With his encouragement, I dug into my rusty CSS skills, and together we built a visualization of the Philadelphia School District’s newly-released budget data. I was hooked. I joined Code for Philly the following week, and started poring over every available set of open data we had.
It Started with a Map I’d search once a year, at least, usually while apartment hunting. Just do it yourself. I’d never made a map before. For the first time, I used a JavaScript library to add functions like geolocation and search. I finished around 3am on Friday, June 20. Over the next few days, the map got over 17,000 views. Dos and Don’ts of Web Map Design. The proliferation of easy to use tools and web services has brought web mapping a long way from its origins. Unlike 5-10 years ago, many government agencies that collect geographic data offer some form of web mapping as part of their Internet based information offerings.
Web mapping has become standard for most real estate listing services, and online mapping services such as Google Maps, Bing Maps, and others are part of the daily usage for many smartphone owners. A well designed web map goes beyond simply aiming to provide geographic information, by also offering an engaging and informative experience to the user. Along with the proliferation of web maps comes the good, bad, and ugly of web map design. Here are some common pointers that developers and designers should be aware of. 1. It’s important to have a tight and focused intent of the web map. Simplicity is key, hence the Keep it Simple, Stupid acronym. Lots of tools, lots of layers, and no legend makes this web map hard to use.
Welcome to MapServer — MapServer 5.2.1 documentation. Schmap - Guides, Widgets and Mapping Solutions for PC, Mac and the Mobile Internet. uDig GIS: A First Look. Part of an ongoing series of on open-source geographic information system (GIS) programs, this article offers an introduction to uDig GIS. uDig is for GIS users of all levels, from beginners to advanced. Introduction In earlier articles, I covered another great GIS application, Quantum GIS (QGIS). One of these previous articles is a general introduction to QGIS while the other illustrates how to integrate GIS data into QGIS.
Just pop the term “GIS” into the search box here at the site and you'll get a nice list of articles. In this particular article I will install and explore an example with uDig. To illustrate some of uDig's basic features, I will download and load geospatial data related to land cover in my own Ingham County, Michigan before European settlement occurred. The Michigan Geographical Library has data for download that illustrates the (theoretical) land cover in the state from the early 1800s in the shapefile format, one of the most common geospatial data formats. Conclusion.