Simon Willison’s Weblog

maps from scratch. An idea whose time has come: using EC2 AMIs for tutorial sessions to give everyone a pre-configured environment.

# 15th March 2009, 1:20 pm / tutorials, ec2, cloud-computing, michal-migurski, mapping

Mapping with Isotype (via) I hadn’t heard of Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education), a beautiful pictographic language created in the 1930s. This Isotype-inspired atlas is pretty spectacular.

# 21st February 2009, 11:09 am / isotype, design, mapping

CloudMade: A Summary of the Future of Mapping. CloudMade are now offering commercially supported APIs on top of OpenStreetMap, including geocoding, routing and tile access libraries in Python/Ruby/Java and a very neat theming tool that lets you design your own map styles. This is really going to kick innovation around OpenStreetMap up a notch.

# 17th February 2009, 11:25 am / openstreetmap, cloudmade, mapping, python, ruby, java, geocoding, routing, tiles

Gaza OpenStreetMap Update. “We’re looking into purchasing satellite imagery for the north or the entirety of Gaza. There’s actually B/W imagery available from yesterday!”

# 7th January 2009, 11:10 pm / gaza, openstreetmap, mapping, satellite, mikel-maron

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits (via) Stunningly beautiful visualisation of the year in OpenStreetMap.

# 2nd January 2009, 10:34 am / visualisation, openstreetmap, mapping

Oakland crime maps XI: how close, and how bad? Michal Migurski’s experiments with heat maps for Oakland Crimespotting, using OpenStreetMap data as that allows him to position his heat map layer underneath the street labels, keeping them legible.

# 30th December 2008, 10:16 am / openstreetmap, michal-migurski, mapping, heatmaps, oaklandcrimespotting

cascadenik: cascading sheets of style for mapnik. Great idea. Mapnik (the open source tile rendering system used by OpenStreetMap and others) has a complex style configuration based on XML. Michal Migurski has build a CSS-style equivalent which compiles down to XML, hopefully making it much quicker and easier to get started with Mapnik customisation.

# 30th August 2008, 10:04 am / css, xml, mapnik, michal-migurski, mapping, openstreetmap, cascadenik

Around the world and back again. Flickr are using data from OpenStreetMap to provide street-level detail of Beijing for the Olympics.

# 13th August 2008, 11:05 pm / openstreetmap, mapping, flickr, beijing, china, olympics

HeatMapAPI (via) Cool (or should that be hot?) API for adding heat maps to any Google Maps application.

# 19th July 2008, 11:46 pm / google-maps, heatmaps, mapping

OSM routing, A*, cycle-filtered, python (via) A python library for finding routes using OpenStreetMap data.

# 5th July 2008, 3:13 pm / python, routing, osm, mapping, openstreetmap

Berlin Zoo on OpenStreetMap. Someone has added all of the animal enclosures in Berlin Zoo (with German animal names) to OpenStreetMap.

# 5th July 2008, 3:07 pm / openstreetmap, berlinzoo, mapping, zoos, german

Dopplr place googlemaps, with and without Yahoo Geo API bounding box adjustment. Dopplr uses Geonames for most geo information, but is now mixing in bounding box data from the Yahoo! Geo web service to improve the default zoom level for their maps. The JSON callback API means no server-side code is required on Dopplr’s end.

# 17th May 2008, 11:35 pm / json, dopplr, geonames, yahoogeo, whereonearth, matt-biddulph, jsonp, javascript, mapping

OSM Super-Strength Export. Awesome new feature on OpenStreetMap: you can browse to anywhere on the map, then hit “export” and download a rendered bitmap or vector (PDF and SVG) image of the currently displayed map—and because it’s OSM there’s no watermark and a very liberal usage license.

# 22nd April 2008, 9:56 am / openstreetmap, maps, mapping, svg, pdf, vector

KML: A new standard for sharing maps. Google’s KML format, which is already supported by both Microsoft and Yahoo!’s map software, has been accepted under the wing of the Open Geospatial Consortium and is now an international standard.

# 14th April 2008, 6:36 pm / ogc, kml, google, google-maps, maps, mapping

London Connections. Marvellously obsessive blog about the vagaries of London transport, including some really nice custom created maps. I love detailed maps of tube stations; anyone know a good place to find them?

# 2nd April 2008, 8:53 pm / londonconnections, maps, mapping, london, transport

About our maps. Why and how EveryBlock rolled their own maps.

# 5th March 2008, 1:05 am / everyblock, mapping

Google Maps Without the Scripting. Google Maps has finally added a simple API for retrieving static map images.

# 4th March 2008, 11:54 pm / staticmaps, mapping, google-maps

Information Freeway (via) Really lovely interface to Open Street Map, sadly suffering from a horribly vague name and almost no publicity at all.

# 14th October 2007, 11:58 pm / mapping, maps, openstreetmap

Poly9 FreeEarth (via) Seriously sexy embedable 3D Flash globe, with a JavaScript API.

# 10th May 2007, 9:17 pm / javascript, flash, mapping, globe, 3d

Multimap API: Decluttering Markers (via) V1.2 of the Multimap API is out, and the nicest new feature is automatic decluttering of close-together markers.

# 14th February 2007, 11:30 am / decluttering, multimap, multimapapi, maps, mapping

Introduction to Neogeography (via) Having run in to Andrew Turner at last year’s EuroOSCON, this is the first O’Reilly Short Cuts PDF that I’ve been seriously tempted to buy.

# 27th January 2007, 12:09 am / eurooscon, andrew-turner, oreilly, mapping, neogeography

Mapping the postal network. Image of a GPS trace for a unit that was left on and sent in the post.

# 20th December 2006, 12:43 am / gps, mapping