The Google Map Creator is a freeware application designed to make thematic mapping using Google Maps simpler. The application takes a shapefile containing geographic areas linked with attributes and automatically generates a working Google Maps website from the data. It does this by pre-creating all the necessary files and saving them into a directory. Publishing the map on the web is then just a matter of copying files onto a web server, allowing Google Maps to be used with the majority of ISPs.

The Socioeconomic Mapping and Resource Topography (SMART) system provides users a mapping capacity along with resource information about federally-funded programs to address delinquency and crime. Users can create maps and retrieve statistics using the socioeconomic, crime, and resource data provided at various geographic levels, including the state, county, and local levels. Users can also map their own data using addresses they have, bookmark locations, save analyses, and print reports.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have been used increasingly to map instances of environmental injustice, the disproportionate exposure of certain populations to environmental hazards. Some of the technical and analytic difficulties of mapping environmental injustice are outlined in this article, along with suggestions for using GIS to better assess and predict environmental health and equity. I examine 13 GIS-based environmental equity studies conducted within the past decade and use a study of noxious land use locations in the Bronx, New York, to illustrate and evaluate the differences in two common methods of determining exposure extent and the characteristics of proximate populations. Unresolved issues in mapping environmental equity and health include lack of comprehensive hazards databases; the inadequacy of current exposure indices; the need to develop realistic methodologies for determining the geographic extent of exposure and the characteristics of the affected populations; and the paucity and insufficiency of health assessment data. GIS have great potential to help us understand the spatial relationship between pollution and health. Refinements in exposure indices; the use of dispersion modeling and advanced proximity analysis; the application of neighborhood-scale analysis; and the consideration of other factors such as zoning and planning policies will enable more conclusive findings. The environmental equity studies reviewed in this article found a disproportionate environmental burden based on race and/or income. It is critical now to demonstrate correspondence between environmental burdens and adverse health impacts--to show the disproportionate effects of pollution rather than just the disproportionate distribution of pollution sources.

The User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS (uDig) is both a GeoSpatial application and a platform through which developers can create new, derived applications. uDig is a core element in an internet aware Geographic Information System.

uDig has been developed with a strong emphasis on supporting the public standards being developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium, and with a special focus on the Web Map Server and Web Feature Server standards.

 

Introductory summer class on integrating GIS and Goolge Mpas 

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GSAPP : columbia university
google maps vs gis an introduction summer '07

Current Syllabus
Week 1 In Class
Week 1 Out of Class
Week 2 In Class
Week 2 Out of Class
Week 2 3D Modeling
Week 3 In Class
Week 3 GPS Handheld Manual
Week 4 : GPS & Making Your Own Point Symbology
Final Mapping Assignment

The Professional Geographer

Volume 56 Issue 4 Page 574-586, November 2004

To cite this article: Michael T. Most, Raja Sengupta, Michael A. Burgener (2004)
Spatial Scale and Population Assignment Choices in Environmental Justice Analyses1
The Professional Geographer 56 (4), 574-586.
doi:10.1111/j.0033-0124.2004.00449.x

Abstract

 

Measures of Visual Clutter: Some Intuitions

We have developed and tested two measures of visual clutter: the Feature Congestion measure, and the Subband Entropy measure.

Feature Congestion measure: This measure of visual clutter is based on the common experience of going to put a note on a colleague's desk. If the desk is uncluttered, it's easy to find a place to put the note where we are confident our colleague will notice it. However, if the desk is cluttered, we tend not to be confident they will notice the note, and perhaps will leave the note on a chair so they will spot it.

This suggests that clutter is related to the difficulty in adding an attention-grabbing item to a display. Visual search models typically attempt to predict the difficulty of searching for a particular target among particular distractors. However, our Statistical Saliency Model can easily make the dual prediction of how difficult it would be to add an attention-grabbing item to a display, and what features that item should have in order to draw attention. Our Feature Congestion measure of visual clutter is based upon this model of visual search.

Subband Entropy measure: This measure of visual clutter is based upon the intuition that a scene or display is less cluttered the more "organized" it is, i.e. the more items "group" together perceptually, whether through use of similar colors, or alignment, or other tricks. A related question to ask is to what extent each part of the display or scene is predictable from the rest of the scene? How redundant is the visual information in the scene?

How We Watch the City: Popularity and Online Maps

Microsoft Research

Danyel Fisher

ABSTRACT
One way of conceptualizing physical spaces is to look at
where people notice, remember, or note them. Computer-
assisted methods give us new tools based on implicit, rather
than explicit, data about how users have examined and
travelled online through cities. “Hotmap” is a tool that
visualizes how people have used maps.live.com, an
interactive mapping service, looking at what parts of the
maps they find most compelling.  

map showing how many times different places have viewed using Microsoft's mapping service

Journal of Planning Education and Research, Vol. 26, No. 4, 404-414 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/0739456X06298820

© 2007 Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning
Exploring Changes in Income Clustering and Centralization during the 1990s
Casey J. Dawkins

Urban Affairs and Planning at Virginia Tech, Virginia Center for Housing Research

This article employs a new "spatial ordering index" to describe and explain changes in the degree of income clustering and centralization within U.S. metropolitan areas during the 1990s. The results suggest that while the spatial pattern of household income became more decentralized and less clustered during the 1990s, the patterns established as of 1990 were highly persistent over the decade. Factors associated with metropolitan area size and growth affected changes in both the degree of centralization and the degree of clustering. Although traditional determinants of suburbanization were associated with increases in income decentralization during the 1990s, densely developed cities with an increase in the percentage of white residents saw increases in income centralization during the decade. Furthermore, changes in the patterns observed were shaped by various policy influences, including the number of Low Income Housing Tax Credit units, urban containment policies, and the degree of local government fragmentation.

Key Words: economic segregation • spatial analysis • metropolitan governance • urban containment • growth management

About Mapbuilder

MapBuilder is a powerful, standards compliant geographic mapping client which runs in a web browser.

GeoTools is an open source (LGPL) Java code library which provides standards compliant methods for the manipulation of geospatial data, for example to implement Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The GeoTools library implements Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) specifications as they are developed, in close collaboration with the GeoAPI and GeoWidgets projects. The capabilities of Geotools are presented in the feature list.

Geotools is used by a number of projects including Web Feature Servers, Web Map Servers, and desktop applications, as is described on this page. Some screenshots of Geotools in action are also available.

Programmers wishing to use GeoTools in their own applications can get more information from the Use page and the User Guide. Developers wishing to extend the GeoTools library can get started on the Develop page and the Developer Guide.

GeoTools releases can be found on the downloads page. The Geotools code base is maintained in a subversion repository.

GeoServer is an Open Source server that connects your information to the Geospatial Web.

With GeoServer you can publish and edit data using open standards. Your information is made available in a large variety of formats as maps/images or actual geospatial data. GeoServer's transactional capabilities offer robust support for shared editing. GeoServer's focus is ease of use and support for standards, in order to serve as 'glue' for the geospatial web, connecting from legacy databases to many diverse clients.

GeoServer supports WFS-T and WMS open protocols from the OGC to produce JPEG, PNG, SVG, KML/KMZ, GML, PDF, Shapefiles and more. More information on specific features of GeoServer can be found here, and some samples of GeoServer in action are in the gallery.

GeoServer is built on Geotools, the same Java toolkit that udig uses. GeoServer is a truly open community, with a well documented and modular codebase, so don't hesitate to get involved.

  

• Mapping studies of criminal justice population concentrations, including adults and juveniles going in and out of prison and jail; people on probation and parole; and, juveniles in detention.
• Graphics and other charts of administrative, political, social, educational, and other boundary aggregations, such as school districts, city council jurisdictions, neighborhoods, or police precincts.
• Supportive contextual maps of socio-demographics, such as single parent households, disconnected youth, home ownership rates, poverty, income, and many other census bureau statistics.
• Maps of other government health and human services, child welfare, and labor populations, such as TANF, Food Stamps, Medicaid, and Unemployment Insurance recipients, as well as Foster Care clients and reports of Abuse and Neglect.
• Mapping studies of prison and jail expenditures.
• Spider mapping analyses of probation and parole caseload distributions.
• Maps of geographic and neighborhood overlaps between criminal justice and other government client populations.
• Prisoner reentry mapping studies.
• Maps of community institutional networks, such as the location, capacity, and performance of schools, or government institutional networks, such as federally qualified health centers.

photo pool of GIS/Maps from Flickr

mapping of homicides in philadelphia - jan1 - sept 30th

youtube trailer

Building Information Technology Skills (bITS) among North Philadelphia Youth is a project funded by the National Science Foundation, ITEST Program and sponsored by the Information Technology and Society Research Group of Temple University. It involves the participation of approximately ninety high school students per year over a three-year long program. bITS is carried out year round and includes five hours of instruction each week for twelve weeks each semester. In addition, students participate in a summer intensive workshop.

Environmental Justice
Case Study: Air Toxic Releases in New Jersey
(from Mennis, J. and Jordan, L., 2005. The distribution of environmental equity: exploring spatial nonstationarity in multivariate models of air toxic releases. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 95(2): 249-268)
Introduction
Geographic information systems (GIS) and multivariate regression are used to analyze socioeconomic inequity in the spatial distribution of New Jersey air toxic release facilities listed in the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Toxic Release Inventory (TRI).

LeadDog creates and maintains GIS street and road maps for Iraq, the Middle East, Africa, Mexico, and the rest of Latin America.  We offer GIS and postcode maps for virtually every country in the world.

Like the NIS in Philadelphia, this site provides lots of information about New York at various levels of geographic specificity.

Acme Mapper shows DOQ and Topo maps for the US and allows lots of other cool things.

The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) is a non-profit, international, voluntary consensus standards organization that is leading the development of standards for geospatial and location based services. Through our member-driven consensus programs, OGC works with government, private industry, and academia to create open and extensible software application programming interfaces for geographic information systems (GIS) and other mainstream technologies. Adopted specifications are available for the public's use at no cost.

Our world map is incrementally built by many submissions from various sources.

Here are examples of different ways of projecting the Earth's surface and a brief discussion of the pros and cons of each of the methods.

The US Census provides thematic maps at various levels of geography and for many data points.

State of Louisiana EPA map-making site.

Create digital maps that display a wide range of cultural material by using place and time as a common element.

ECAI technical infrastructure illustrates the vision of sharing distributed data and using time enabled mapping tools.

GIS technology is proving itself to be a valuable tool for organizing data for both the public and private sectors -- for municipal infrastructure maintenance and record-keeping, regional planning, real estate, land use, and tourism. At the same time, scholars are using the technology in disciplines that embrace the humanities, the social sciences, the physical sciences, and medicine.

Now, PACSCL invites current and potential GIS users to gather to think about new uses for a geographic based resource, new users from a range of disciplines, and new ranges of contributors and contributions. The purpose of this symposium is to focus less on the "how" of building a GIS and more on the "why." We will concentrate on finding ways that data from all of these sectors -- when organized with a sense of place and time -- can offer new insights into connections across these disciplines.

Panel discussions in the mornings will be followed by facilitated small group discussions and information sharing in the afternoons. Participants will be grouped according to potential GIS uses (history, social sciences, city/regional planning, human services, public health, etc.) and users (professional affinity groups) for the small group discussions. PACSCL's objectives in hosting this event are to foster increased cooperation among a widened range of current and potential GIS users and to give participants the opportunity to consider issues of how best to work together in the presence of a lively and informed group of colleagues. The results of this symposium will be used to further shape the Greater Philadelphia GeoHistory Network.

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