MasterMaps

After almost 9 years at the United Nations Association of Norway (UNA Norway), it was time to seek new challenges. On monday I'll start working for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation ( NRK ). I'll miss my great colleagues and UNA-Norway - and my baby, Globalis . Globalis is now 7 years old. She speaks 5 languages fluently; Norwegian , Swedish , Danish , Finnish and Icelandic . She is very busy teaching thousands of visitors every day about our diverse, unfair and exciting world - by visual means: Globalis, a lot of clever people have taken part in your upbringing, and I'm sure UNA Norway will give you a long and prosperous life. You're mission in life couldn't be more important! Please follow Globalis on Facebook ! ----- A vital part of Globalis is the  world map collection . So far it contains 40 maps on environment and human impact. The map data was researched, collected and prepared in cooperation with  Nordpil  and  Grid-Arenda...

My workplace, United Nations Association of Norway (UNA Norway), has 700 member schools across the country. We wanted to include a map on our webpage to show all our members. The map should be automatically updated when new schools are added or removed. From previous experience, I knew that having 700 markers on a single map is problematic . Google Fusion Tables overcomes this limitation in a clever way. Especially for nerds: We use SugarCRM to keep track of our members. SugarCRM is highly customisable and it's easy to add extra fields for latitude and longitude positions. I wrote a PHP script which synchronises a SugarCRM database (MySQL) with Google Fusion Tables . The script first checks if the last modifed date or the number of rows are equal. If not, the script loops through all rows (members) in the SugarCRM database. If the member exist in Fusion Tables, it's updated if modified date is different. If the member don't exist in Fusion Tables, it's inser...

| Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | New uses of GIS There have been a growing number of attempts to combine critical human geography with GIS methods and techniques (O'Sullivan, 2006). Here are some successful examples where researchers informed by social theory have engaged with the technology, rather than to criticise from the outside. People Participating GIS (PPGIS) emerged out of the critic that GIS further privileged those in power and marginalised others. PPGIS pertains to use GIS to broaden public involvement in policymaking and to promote the goals of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), grassroot groups, and community-based organisations (Sieber, 2006). But it is important to be aware that PPGIS can introduce new set of power relations into a community (Crampton, 2003) Counter-mapping is a related concept to PPGIS, referring to efforts to contest and undermine power relations and asymmetries in relation to cartographic products (Harris and Hazen, 2006). The term was introdu...

| Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Military connections "The war against Iraq in 1990-91 was the first full-scale GIS war" . This is the opening line in a paper by Neil Smith (1992) in the Progress in Human Geography journal. Smith describes the military roots of GIS and how the techology is (mis)used in modern warfare. Technology does not cause war, but Smith argues that techniques are not easily separatable from their uses. GIS are making war more "doable". These connections were clearly visible in the air and land operations, Operation Desert Storm, of the first Gulf War. Digitised map data was provided by military and scientific agencies. 3D simulations were used to navigate through the desert, and "Geo-smart" bombs were equipped with a video camera so their way to the target could be screened by CNN. Smith calls this a "perverse extravaganza" as the war claimed an estimated 200 000 Iraqi lives. Smith is conserned how GIS, combined with mo...

| Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Geographical Information Systems (GIS) did not ease into the geography departments without friction, and it is has been said that "academic geographers often have a love/hate relationship with GIS" (Schuurman, 2004:2). In this blog series, I try to reveal this dichotomy by looking at the historical background and the arguments put forward. As the love/hate relationship weakened in the second half of the 90s, we see how co-operation between GIS scholars and their critics fostered a new GIS discourse. The series ends by looking at further possibilities of combining quantitative and qualitative methods with GIS. Geographical information systems (GIS) influence many aspects of the modern society. We leave locational, electronical tracks whenever we use a credit card, turn on our mobile phone or send an email. Car navigation systems are becoming state-of-the-art in new automobiles. Web mapping tools like Google Earth are bringing the ideas of GIS to...

Inspired by this website ( thematicmapping.org ), Vladimír Bačík created a great-looking site showing statistical data for Slovakia using Google Earth and KML. Selected variables can be displayed on the territory of districts and regions, as well as the whole Slovak Republic. Various thematic mapping techniques are in use. Give it a try!

My holiday project, apart from skiing, was to play with the new Natural Earth dataset . This is a public domain map dataset available at three scales, 1:110m, 1:50m and 1:10m. By combing raster and vector data you can make a variety of visually pleasing maps. You can use my Natural Earth Browser to study the great linework of Natural Earth. Natural Earth Browser consists of 13 map layers, 3 base maps and 10 overlays, which are shown in the original projection (Geographic, WGS84 datum). The map overlays are rendered as transparent map tiles. The layers can be reordered by drag-and-drop, and you can change the opacity of each layer with the slider control. Small scale data (1:110m) are shown for zoom level 1 and 2, medium scale data (1:50m) for zoom level 3 to 5, and large scale data (1:10m) for zoom level 6. Natural Earth Browser was created with a variety of open source tools. Map tiles from raster data was created with MapTiler and optimised with pngng . Map tiles fro...