Data Transfer Solutions (DTS) developed an application for the Texas Forest service called the Texas Wildfire Data Browser. The application provides viewing for wildfire threats, fuel hazards and fire locations.

In light of the Iowa flooding, MSNBC posted an interactive map allowing users to track flooding locations in the Midwest. The majority of the points on the map give the levels of historical rivers and the others even link to specified news areas.

Google Earth’s text gets a make-over with a new option to view KML texts on the map. Designed by Sergey Devytakov, the new tool, called Labels, allows the specification of font changes, shadows and outlines and choice of icon, etc.

Maps and texts combine through Kvisu.com. This unique search engine takes text based results and aligns them with a surface map using visualized keywords.

Zimbabwe gets on the map. Google Maps has been used to track the political campaign of Morgan Tsvangirai and the unfortunate terror occurring in the country.

Popularity: 17% [?]

The first of our series on “Cartography and the GeoWeb” covers the cartography of GeoWeb base maps - one of the most obvious places cartography is applied on the GeoWeb. The tiles from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are nearly ubiquitous in map mashups. As each of the technology giants got into the mapping game, they had to make many cartographic decisions on how they would present data on a map. This leads to a myriad of mapping option ranging from the color palette selected for map elements, to font and to the placement of labels on the map. To see the effect these different choices can have on a base map, check a comparison of cartography for the street base maps of the three providers below:

Yahoo Maps

Microsoft Virtual Earth

Google Maps

When it comes to cartographic design I would rank it 1) Yahoo 2) MSVE 3) Google, which should not be too surprising since Yahoo! hired a bunch of cartographers to design theirs. Since Yahoo! unveiled their new cartography, Google has introduced terrain view and MSVE has added elevation reliefs to their maps as well - although I cannot for the life of me find a reference to when the upgrade happened.

While the race for more content, and sometimes more cartography, has raged amongst the big three providers, there has been a backlash in the developer community. This was most poignantly seen in Paul Smith’s “Take Control of Your Map” article on A List Apart. As you can see in the screen shots above, the base maps from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have become pretty crowded and dense. Many Web designers would like to control the design on their maps the same way they do their Web pages leading to a movement to “roll your own maps”.

This movement has leveraged the pioneering work of OpenStreetMaps to create their own independent base maps for streets. The OSM effort led to creation of applications like Mapnik and Osmarender to style the GPS data they collected for the project, although both are some what notorious for their lack of usability. This has not stopped EveryBlock from using Mapnik to make custom maps for their data.

The map is definitely less busy than the big three providers, and I believe suits EveryBlocks purposes well, although I might have gone with a different color combination. The beauty, though, of EveryBlock’s approach is that if I wanted another color sequence, I could take Mapnik and OSM data and have at it. I believe it is just one of the many examples we’ll see democratizing cartography - allowing the public to “roll their own”.

Popularity: 28% [?]

Cuba has been in the spotlight lately as Raúl Castro officially takes over as President ending the 49 year rule of his brother Fidel Castro. What will be the legacy of Fidel Castro and the socialist revolution that he led since 1959? One of the most acclaimed successes for the Cuban government has been its progress in health and health care, particularly in the rural areas in the eastern part of the island. Whether or not health care in Cuba is what the government claims it to be is strongly debated. See for yourself the state of health and health care in Cuba using Finder!.

The Cuban government provides in depth statistics on the health of its population by province and finder has these data available for the years 1996 to 2006 with more than 80 health and health care related attributes. Whether you are interested in the change in infant mortality over the last decade, which provinces have more doctors per resident, or what is the leading cause of death in each province, this dataset will help illustrate what the situation is on the island.

Here is an example of what these data can be used for. This map shows the number of family doctors per habitant in 2006. Provinces in red have less doctors and the green ones have more.

See data for:
2006
2005
2004
2003
2002
2001
2000
1999
1998
1997
1996

Popularity: 18% [?]

Frank at the Google Earth Blog just leaked that Google will be announcing an API for Google Earth that will run in a browser. The short of it is you will be able to get GE’s 3D rendering capabilities and KML support to run in a browser. The first release will be just Windows, but will support IE, Firefox and other Mozilla flavors.

This looks to be a direct shot at Microsoft’s 3D Virtual Earth that also runs in the browser. The question mark in my mind will be if the Google Earth version has the same performance issues as MSVE. It is also interesting that Google released an API instead of a new version of GE that ran in a browser. Will this be a case of Google testing the waters with the API then releasing a product?

From a personal perspective I’ll be very interested to see how the new Google Earth API handles KML. Frank says the new API will be a, “subset of the Google Earth 3D graphics rendering engine and interfaces with KML support”. The question is will that KML support be robust like Google Earth allowing thousands of geometries to be drawn or less robust like Google Maps where you are limited to the low hundreds. I’m sure we’ll see soon enough, but congrats to Google on porting the technology to a browser, surely not an easy task. Although it begs one last question - does this herald the end of thick client geobrowsers?

Popularity: 18% [?]

Mashable reports that Google Maps features a new API that has flash graphics that can be used for each title layer, maker and information windows. This means you can create more dynamic map mashups.

Not only does Google Maps have flash graphics, but they have also added the ability for video sharing, Wikipedia entries, real estate listings, and geo-coded photos.

Google Earth and David Rumsey have formed a relationship where historical map collections are available through a Google Earth layer. More data means more mashups!

Interesting how Where 2.0 has a Twitter account that wasn’t followed nearly as much as it should have been.

All Points Blog also provides a “plain-English” explanation of the Google / ESRI announcement.

Popularity: 23% [?]