Maps by Emily Sciarillo and William Benjamin

Last week President Obama presented the Congress and the American people with his examination of the state of the union after his first year in office. He outlined his achievements as well as some of his failures in the past year and presented his plans for the future. We thought we would make maps highlighting some of his major points in the speech. Some maps we made with datasets that are regularly updated in Finder! such as unemployment. For others we created new datasets and uploaded them into the database.

Recognizing that the economy is the one issue foremost in American’s minds, he focused much of his speech on the subject. Job creation and small business growth were major factors in his plan for improving the economy, citing the Stimulus Package as the engine for both.

The first map shows how the unemployment has changed in the past year. The green counties show areas where unemployment rates decreased since last November and the purple counties show areas with increasing unemployment.

It is no surprise that most areas of the US have seen their unemployment rates continue to increase but to put that into perspective, it is helpful look at the same scale for the 12 months change during the last year of the Bush administration (the next map). During Bush’s last year the unemployment also rose in much of the country however it appears that during Obama’s first year, more counties increased dramatically (by 4% or more) and less counties improved their unemployment rates at all. To address unemployment the president spoke of the Jobs Bill and a major component of that bill is to fund clean energy projects. The following map shows current wind energy projects in each state. If DC is going to promote more environmental projects around the US, than it might be interesting to see how green DC itself is. The next map shows commercial buildings and plants in downtown DC that are Energy Star approved. Another way that the President suggested he will boost job growth is by doubling our exports in the next 5 years and mentioned specifically trade with South Korea, Colombia and Panama. The map below shows the US Trade Balance for all countries for 2009. As expected we have a high trade deficit with China. It is interesting to see with what countries in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East we have a deficit or a surplus. This next map shows the total trade balance of each country in the world. The US clearly has the highest trade deficit. As part of the recovery act, Obama highlighted a high speed rail plan. These projects around the country should provide for at least some job growth. The next map shows where these projects will be on top of the unemployment rates. Although not the main topic in his address, health care did get a lengthy mention. The president reconfirmed his commitment to improving health care in this country, particularly for the uninsured and underinsured. The next map shows uninsured Americans by state. Check out these dataset and others in Finder!

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The beauty of Geocommons is the ease of use and ability to manipulate data quickly. Sometimes we have shapefiles of data that contain polygons, say for buildings. What if I want to view those buildings in Maker! by points rather than polygons. Easy! Simply upload your shapefile, fill out the metadata, and then download the data as a csv. You can find this option to the right of the layer information, which is the bottom of three options.

When you open the csv, Finder! has already found the centroids of the polygons for you and you will see two columns for latitude and longitude. The next step is to save the csv and upload this to Finder!. Now you've got a file of points rather than polygons. You don't even have to change the attribute names because Finder! likes them in any format.

Another great option for the csv download is to sort based on one of the attributes. For example, if you want to see buildings by type, such as "collapsed" simply sort, select the collapsed buildings, copy and paste into a new csv. Then copy the header row and save. Reupload into Finder! and bam, you've got collapsed buildings as points in Maker!

Upload your own shapefiles and see what you can come up with using our easy download options.

Below are step by step screenshots of this simple process. Enjoy!

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Its now the third week of the disaster in Haiti and keeping up with the influx of updated information is a job and a half. Sometimes I have to search for hours and hours to find legitimate, useful information to map out projects in various parts of the world. But with resources like Open Street Map, Ushahidi, Sahana, GeoFabrik, I'm beginning to see something positive happening. Can a disaster like the one in Haiti prompt a positive reaction from the world in terms of GIS? I think so.

Each day I have been updating our Open Street Map extracts from GeoFabrik and the changes each day have been truly awe inspiring to see. From a country we had very little infrastructure data on, we now have a huge wealth of up to the minute information on roads, railways, waterways, buildings, the latest collapses, wrecks, points of interest, etc. We can paint a more accurate picture of the situation in Haiti because of all the on the ground contributions of people sending text messages, encampment reports, and all of the Open Street Map data.

Seeing the ability to mobilize and produce data with speed and accuracy in Haiti, other countries and will hopefully be spurred to follow suit. And hopefully the next time disaster strikes, the world will be more prepared to help.

View full map

For more data visit Finder! and search "haitiquake."

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One of the important aspects of sharing data is creating a format that is sharing friendly. A topic that frequently comes up at FortiusOne is bad spreadsheets. If you are going to share a spreadsheet there are a couple ways to make it easier for those involved. Developers usually think of spreadsheets are more of a database table, there are others that think of them as reports. Spreadsheets have a place in both situations. If it is meant to be a report, by all means make it a report. If you are recording data to share out make it more like a table. If people are going to mashup your data and input it into various systems the table version is much less of a headache. So what does it mean to make your spreadsheet table-like? You only have one set of columns in each page. Each column can have a header and probably should unless you are handing out metadata with your document, but sometimes metdata gets seperated from its data so that is not ideal. No columns should be merged anywhere in the page, each column should be the same width all the way down.

Hard to Ingest Spreadsheet

Easy to Ingest Spreadsheet

Don't be afraid to share your data if you have the “Bad Spreadsheet” we still want it. Though when deciding what format to record you data in please keep the “Good Spreadsheet” in mind. Depending on your technical expertise another option is to keep your data in the “Good Spreadsheet” and create a report from it. Following these tips will not only help you upload into GeoCommons, but also help you share with others that want to create mashups.

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