A nice google maps mashup about election results.

Includes beautiful maps and atlases of the Hexamer Volumes from the 1850's through Philadelphia Land Use maps 1960's.

Town of Blacksburg Planning & Engineering department provides engineering information for town infrastructure, gis information, and town planning documents.

NeighborhoodBase includes maps and data from a number of city agencies, plus census data. All data is available for aggregation at a range of geographic levels (ie, wards, census tracts, etc). A great source for data and maps about life in Philadelphia.

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.

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.

  

An exhibition created to demonstrate the power of maps to understand, navigate, and manage not only physical places, but also abstract information spaces.

Great collection of maps.

photo pool of GIS/Maps from Flickr

Gutenkarte is a geographic text browser, intended to help readers explore the spatial component of classic works of literature. Gutenkarte downloads public domain texts from Project Gutenberg, and then feeds them to MetaCarta's GeoParser API, which extracts and returns all the geographic locations it can find. Gutenkarte stores these locations in a database, along with citations into the text itself, and offers an interface where the book can be browsed by chapter, by place, or all at once on an interactive map. Ultimately, Gutenkarte will offer the ability to annotate and correct the places in the database, so that the community will be able construct and share rich geographic views of Project Gutenberg's enormous body of literary classics

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

The maps presented on this website are cartograms, otherwise known as density-equalising maps. The maps of the world you are used to seeing attempt to represent countries according to their land area. A cartogram re-sizes each country (or other geographical unit) according to some other variable - for example population, GDP, number of people with AIDS, etc. In the population example, densely-populated country such as the UK will appear much larger than it does on a standard map, and sparsely populated countries will appear smaller.

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.

Allows users to store, tag, and share locations -- based on google maps, but does interesting things. Users add photos of places, and lots of other tagged info about the places.

Historical Maps plus GIS from the David Rumsey Collection.

While many businesses were in the path of these storms, some were affected and others were not. Knowing where affected businesses are concentrated can guide efforts by Federal, State, and local agencies, service organizations, and entrepreneurs to respond to the storms and rebuild the economies of these areas.

In this interactive web site, you are able to select a city or metropolitan area and view the location of high-poverty census tracts and observe the growth of high-poverty areas over time. In addition, you may view the changing demographics of the population. All of the maps here are based on U.S. Census data from 1970 through 2000. The data are summarized at the neighborhood level, using Census Tracts as proxies for neighborhoods.

The United States Census provides thematic maps for many of the data elements available through the Census.

Maps votes in the 2003 California Election by pixel rather than county to show a more accurate view of the vote distribution based on population rather than area.

Twentieth century conditions in maps.

The map images as well as the satellite imagery belong to Google and are pulled from maps.google.com. The data is extracted from the 2000 United States Census and can be downloaded from www.census.gov.

System for TAgging Messages, Post-Inferential Semantics

neat application of google maps

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software relies on data sets that cover the whole planet. To cope with the flood of GIS data and their formats, programmers have created several open source libraries and GIS suites. This article gives a short introduction to the range and depth of GIS tools and libraries available for UNIX® and Linux®.

EDINA is actively seeking global and regional geographic datasets which can be made available to the UK Higher and Further Education community. Many global datasets are now being published via web map servers and are accessible through the use of interoperability standards. EDINA have created a Web Map Viewer, which will allow anyone with Internet access to view geographic data available through web map servers around the World.

Census page listing Hurricane Katrina related info.

List of data sets available from USUS. Huge and quite up to date.

List of data sets available from USUS. Huge and quite up to date.

he World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Remote Sensing and GIS for Public Health (WHOCC) at LSU is dedicated to the application and advancement of geographic information science (GISc) and geographic technologies for Public Health and disease modeling.

Federal Gateway to information about Katrina in New Orleans. Includes maps, GIS data, interactive mapping packages, etc.

Collection of data and maps from UCGIS related to Katrina and New Orleans