MasterMaps

I need a vacation from blogging and computers, so I'm going to take one. Have a great Christmas and a Happy New Year! I'll be back in 2009. (The population prism map is from Edmar Moretti's Brazilian version of the Thematic Mapping Engine. The highest prism is São Paulo, with its metropolitan area ranking seventh among the largest urban areas in the world.)

The lecture is titled The Spread of Scientific Knowledge from the Royal Society to Google Earth and Beyond and will be given at 6:30 pm San Francisco time .  Watch AGU webcast

After I handed in my MSc thesis in August, Google invited me to San Francisco to present my work. Yesterday, I gave a tech talk at Googleplex about the Thematic Mapping Engine ( now open-source ) and how KML and Google Earth could be improved to better support popular thematic mapping techniques . My slides are available on SlideShare . My talk was filmed and will probably appear online. I was a bit nervous during the presentation, so its not my best performance  :-& Anyway, I really enjoyed the discussions with the geo developers, the lunch talks, and the guided tour around Googleplex. Thanks Google! The next event is the AGU 2008 Fall Meeting starting on Monday. I'm an invited speaker at the Virtual Globes at AGU session on Thursday. 

Many people have asked, - and today, I've released the source code of the Thematic Mapping Engine  (TME) under a GPLv3 license . The engine takes statistical data, spatial features and thematic mapping parameters as input and returns a KMZ file. This file can be viewed in Google Earth, or other geobrowsers supporting the KML standard. TME can be accessed from a web interface or a PHP script.  TME web interface With the TME web interface, thematic maps can be created in a web browser, without a single line of code. This is achieved through an interactive web form where the user can select between statistical indicators and various thematic mapping techniques. Mapping parameters, like the colour and size, can be readily changed. The form returns a KMZ file which can be visualised directly in the web browser using the new Google Earth plug-in, or downloaded to a computer.  TME Application Programming Interface (API) The Thematic Mapping Engine can also be used as an application progra...

Thematic maps have become a primary mechanism for summarising and communicating the increased volumes of geographically related information. This blog post is a short summary of the most common thematic mapping techniques. Jaques Bertin (1967) established a graphic system of visual variables , which represents an universally recognized theory of the cartographic transcription of geographical information (Koch, 2001). Visual variables describe the perceived differences in map symbols that are used to represent geographical phenomena (Slocum et al., 2005). Bertin’s system has been subsequently modified by various cartographers, and the visual variables presented below are based on Slocum et al. (2007), which add 3-D symbolisation. (Image from InfoVis:Wiki ) Cartographers commonly distinguish between point , line , area and volume symbolisation (Robinson et al., 1995; Slocum et al., 2005). These distinctions may be summarised as follows: A point symbol refer to a particular location ...