Monday, July 28. 2008

Rural Areas Top Map of Highest Fatality Roads in the U.S.

A new Google Maps mashup, Safe Road Maps, debuts today from the Center for Excellence in Rural Safety. From the site:

This website is a ground-breaking tool that combines information from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System with Google Maps to give you a visual representation of traffic safety across the entire nation. With this system, you can enter an address and view the roads that have the highest number of traffic fatalities in a specified area. You can also view dynamically generated maps that show how public policy has been implemented to improve transportation safety by region. Our hope is that this site brings both increased safety and awareness to transportation policy makers and private citizens.

This is quite an elaborate application, one that takes a moment or two to understand and use. Lots of filtering options should allow the curious to tap into just the geography and situations of interest.

via LiveScience

Tableau 4 Positioning: Between Google Maps and ESRI

I was impressed to see basically that description of a the latest version of Tableau, a data visualization application in Intelligent Enterprise. Where did Doug Henschen get that idea? From the VP of marketing:

"For the average worker or business analysts, the 'where' questions often aren't complicated enough to require a GIS tool and knowledge of cartography and map layers," says Elissa Fink, vice president of marketing. "At the other end of the spectrum, MapPoint and Google Mashups are great ways to display data, but they're not intended for analytics. We wanted to make maps part of the analytic workflow within Tableau."

How does that work? The article goes on:

Data elements such as city, state and country are now automatically recognized as mappable dimensions, and users can also assign geospatial rules to selected dimensions.

I saw the PR on the new release last week (I'd never heard of the company) and visited the site but could quite get at what this app was about. The "new features" page highlights the limitation of more and less technical solutions:

Most solutions for mapping require technical knowledge that limits the use of maps in visual analysis. Or maps are displays like “mashups” which require programming skills and use map images designed for navigation, not analysis. Tableau 4.0 integrates of maps as another view type that rapidly answers questions about data.

Looking at the website, my sense is this another stab at "GIS is too complex, but we make it easy, but don't forget analytics." Oh, and I learned about the embedded mapping tools: "you don't have to know a latitude from a longitude."

Map Hawk - Watching the Media and How it Uses Maps

Map Hawk is a newly launched blog that will focus on maps and mapping technology in use by the mainstream media. With the upcoming U.S. elections the Olympics and ongoing world events, Map Hawk will document and explore the use of maps in print, online and televised media. You'll find my coverage both here on APB and at MapHawk.blogspot.com. I hope you'll join the conversation, send comment s, subscribe to the daily newsletter and participate in the ongoing polls. See the first poll on how CNN should improve their mapping capabilities for the presidential election.

Quote of the Day - Definition of "geospatial intelligence" ... "a melding of...ologies and ographies"

Asked how he would define "geospatial intelligence, retired UK brigadier Nick Rigby, former director of intelligence for the UK Ministry of Defense said, "For me it is the melding of geospatial information [that of data and products] across the spectrum of the -ologies and -ographies with the intelligence disciplines to deliver a capability greater than the sum of the constituent parts - a means of visualising the instance, situation or forecasting the same," said Rigby, who is now a non-executive director with ESRI UK.

He went on to say that, "the geospatial intelligence discipline had become a key enabler in network- or information-centric operations."


--from Jane's