MasterMaps

My workplace, The Norwegian Public Service broadcaster NRK ,  is currently transmitting a 134 hour boat trip along the coast of Norway, live and non stop! It's already a big hit on Norwegian TV . Hurtigruten , the Norwegian Express Line , has for well over 100 years been the backbone of coastal Norway, bringing people and goods up and down the weather-beaten coast. Viewers are able to follow every minute of the trip on NRK’s channel 2. You can see the live position of the ship,  MS Nordnorge , on Google Earth (updated every 10 seconds): [ Fullscreen ] The live stream is available below and at  nrk.no/hurtigruten  from Thursday June 16th 2011 until the ship lands in Kirkenes Wednesday June 22nd. Don't expect a lot of action, just relax and follow the great scenery - this is Slow TV! There's also a Flickr photostream  and a twitter hashtag #hurtigruten . The video material from the forward facing camera and an export from all the sh...

One of the great benefits of Google Fusion Tables is the possibility to merge data from multiple tables. The Guardian Datablog is showing an example of how you can combine your data with the Natural Earth tables I presented in my last blog post . The Guardian is combining their travel advice table  with one of my Natural Earth tables  to create a merged table . This table is then used to create a choropleth map showing where in the world it's safe to travel (darker colours are countries with stronger warnings): Fullscreen version The map is created with the build-in mapping capabilities of Fusion Tables. 

Natural Earth  is a jewel among public domain datasets. I’ve made the entire vector dataset (175,000 features!) available on Google Fusion Tables  (GFT). Now you can easily query and download vector geometries in different formats (KML, GeoJSON, WKT and SVG) with associated attributes. This experiment will show if Google Fusion Tables can be used as a cloud-based feature server. All 139 Natural Earth fusion tables are listed in this table . Every table is public and exportable. A few features are missing at 1:10 million scale because the polygons where too large for GFT (the character limit for a given cell is 1 million characters). The data features are described on  the Natural Earth website . Table names are identical to the original shapefile names.  All tables include 4 geometry columns containing vector data in various formats: kml_4326: Keyhole Markup Language (KML) json_4326: GeoJSON geometries wkt_4326: Well-known text (WKT) svg_4326: Scala...

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...