I came across some data from the situation that I found to be interesting from the National Defense Management Authority of Pakistan. This site has a plethora of information related to the floods in Pakistan. Since the 1st of August the NDMA has been putting out daily reports of the flooding situation in Pakistan. This report has useful information on damage reports, rescue efforts, and available supplies broken up by affected provinces in Pakistan. I was able to upload some of the data into GeoCommons and have been able to create some interesting maps that tell a good visual story. Below is a map that illustrates various types of damage.

View full map

Here are the three datasets that have been created from the data at Pakistan NDMA and Flickr. We will continue to monitor the situation here at FortiusOne and will add more data soon.

Summary of Rescue Equipment in use by Province, Pakistan Floods, 8.17.2010
Summary of Damages and Rescues by Province, Pakistan Floods, 8.17.2010
Summary of Relief Items Provided by Province, Pakistan Floods, 8.17.2010
Recent Uploads from Flickr tagged pakistanflood, with geodata

Try creating your own maps from the data to see how you can get an in-depth look at the situation. Also, search throughout the GeoCommons database to find other data on Pakistan to add to your maps

We are also looking for other types of data related to this tragic incident to add into GeoCommons. By obtaining more data in GeoCommons, people can get a clearer picture of the tragedy and hopefully make decisions to help in the relief effort. Please tag any related data or maps with the tag pakistanflood2010. Thanks

FortiusOne has been involved in a project to map all the World Bank’s projects. Dubbed “Mapping for Results” it is a collaboration between Development Gateway, AidData and the World Bank.  The initial step is to actually map where the projects are taking place. Geocoding is the process of placing information in its geographic place.  When you enter an address into a routing application to get directions the process of placing that address on the map is a type of geocoding.  The process being utilized in Mapping for Results is far more manual than that though.

A team from College of William and Mary and Brigham Young University have been hard doing this geocoding.  They use a variety of sources on the web in an attempt to pinpoint where projects are taking place.   I didn’t think it was possible to be more excited about geocoding than I, but after watching this video I think they might be.  Where FortiusOne comes into this project is the visualization once the projects have been mapped.

Breaking down aid funding by a variety of geographies and projects it gives a clearer picture of what is being work on where.  This can assist in evaluation of the efficacy of various projects and help determine under-served regions.  You can see video of some of the resulting visualization in the video below:

I’ve been friends with Andrei through my work on Mapufacture and he has clearly done ground-breaking work in developing visualization and mapping platforms. He built AFComponents and developed the first ActionScript compatible mapping library for modern mapping providers such as Google, Microsoft, and others. This evolved into UMapper which continued to grow and add features for simple map creation and embedding that’s been used by numerous media and enterprises such as USA Today, National Geographic, and a place we’ve been featured as well, the Huffington Post.

As his role of head of visualization, Andrei will continuing to evolve our map, and non-cartographic, visualization components. We’ve worked with some of the best in the industry such as AxisMaps and Stamen Design, as well as the incredibly bright engineers at FortiusOne to develop some great capabilities you’ll be seeing soon. But we’re really excited about the ideas and energy that Andrei will be bringing to the team – so definitely expect some even more amazing things soon!

Tim has many accomplishments, from Geocodr, the first geocoder based on Flickr photo tags that let you search for “happiness in New York” (map), even before you could download the shapefiles – to his more recent and well known efforts in building MapWarper in use by the New York Public Library for georectifying and sharing out their historic map archives.

In addition, Tim was responsible for the first uploads of the Haitian GIS data from CNIGS almost one year to the day before the earthquake this past January. He stood up a MapWarper specifically for relief efforts as thousands of volunteers around the world rectified and traced historics maps of Haiti from the 1990′s. He has also been an active member of OpenStreetMap, including hosting worldwide mapping parties.

We’re excited to have Tim joining the FortiusOne team – and definitely expect to see some great new geospatial features from him in GeoCommons in the very near future.

The first of these exercises that FortiusOne participated in was last August, but only remotely.  That was the start of our involvement running an offline geo-stack for humanitarian relief.  Since then Todd Huffman has taken the prototype to Afghanistan and the tools worked on at that exercise have continued to be developed.  Of course these events have been minor compared to the effect of the earthquake in Haiti.  The importance of collaboration in crisis response has been long stated as a necessity, but Haiti really showed how powerful it could be.

One really minor feature I’m really excited about t is no longer using subdomains in our Mac Mini deployments.  This means that if the offline instance URL is http://geoiq.local for example there is not extra configuration to access Finder and Maker.  Previously the URLs looked like http://finder.geoiq.local and http://maker.geoiq.local, in the absence of DNS this necessitated adding 3 hostfile entries.  Now the URLs look like http://geoiq.local/finder and http://geoiq.local/maker for example.  This means just an IP address can be used or a single hostfile entry is required.

One addition to RELIEF that I want to work with is Stewart Long and his balloon photography.  Two weeks ago at WhereCampSoCal he made this photo using an inexpensive camera and a weather balloon, then careful stitching.  After processing imagery this week I plan to tile the imagery and put it into the offline GeoIQ instance I built and derive vector data within an OpenStreetMap instance set-up for the exercise.  Working through the whole process is important to work out integrations before there is a crisis.  Look for more updates throughout the week, I promise to not get so consumed by the hacking and collaboration that I forget to post.

Want to embed maps in your own blog? GeoCommons makes it easy to do.

View your map in Maker! and click on the “Details” button in the upper right. In the Map Details window that opens, click on the gray box that says “Embed this map in your website”.

Copy all the text in the box, and paste it directly into your blog post or web page. If you are using a blog tool like WordPress, you will want to copy the code into the HTML tab.

Preview your post, and you should see your map displayed!

By default the map is 400 pixels high. You can modify this default height and width by changing the numbers in the <style> section of the embed code. For example, to set the height to 300 pixels and the width to 500 pixels, modify the values to height: 300px; width: 500px.

Here is the Huffington Post’s map embedded by simply copying and pasting the embed code:

View full map

Have you embedded a GeoCommons map in your blog? Share it with us by commenting below!

The one thing that is atypical of this WhereCamp is that it is not entirely an unconference. The first day there are scheduled sessions and keynotes. Friend of FortiusOne, Todd Huffman is keynoting as well as Eric Frost from San Diego State University Viz Center. I’ll be giving two workshops, the first on using GeoCommons to share data and make custom maps. The second workshop is on how to edit in OpenStreetMap. There are also going to be workshops from SimpleGeo, ESRI and Urban Mapping. While the structured portion of the event is going on during the day Saturday there will also be unconference sessions. Sunday sessions are all ad-hoc and will be proposed the day of the event. I hope to participate in a session on geolocative games, which is one of my favorite topics at most WhereCamps. Some people from Grassroots Mapping will be around, so I hope to help fly some kites and balloons to take aerial photography as well.

Since WhereCamps are usually free to the attendees I was excited that FortiusOne was able to sponsor the event. Without sponsors it would be impossible to keep these events free. The cost of running an ad-hoc event is relatively cheap, but there are still expenses for food and office materials to make the grid for example.

Registration is still open for WhereCampSoCal up until almost the start of the event. So if this sounds fun to you sign-up and I’ll see you there!

First I selected a dataset I was interested in. In this example I picked “Years of Life Lost to Communicable Diseases (%).” I downloaded the data as a CSV and then uploaded it using Finder. Since the data did not have geographic boundaries I utilized GeoJoin.  First I selected World Boundaries and used the name column to join the UNdata to the boundary dataset.

Next I selected the columns I wanted to join by selecting “country or area” in my dataset and “Name” in the country boundaries.

Only 163 of 191 features matched, but I decided it was okay to continue on and make a map.  I first added metadata and then clicked the “Make a Map” link. Below is my final result. If you decide to upload data yourself or make a map please tag is “UNdata” so we can aggregate them together.

View full map

I came across an interesting graphic about the story created by Matthew Bambach of the Seattle Times. It is a map of criminal incidents that have been tied together to Colton Harris-Moore aka The Barefoot Bandit. I decided to make a similar map of the incidents, but decided to incorporate the temporal animation feature that GeoCommons provides. Below is the map I created in Maker!:

View full map

By clicking the green clock in the layers box in the upper right hand side of the page you can open up a temporal timeline. This timeline allows you to see a temporal animation of the crimes as they took place across the country. You are also able to see the periods when criminal activity was slow or very active. Overall, the temporal animation is able to give you a better understanding of the Barefoot Bandit’s activity compared to a map with static points.