Update: New Online Maps
The Seattle crime map (#3 below) had to be taken off line when it nearly crashed city servers:
[The map] had to be shut down after it almost crashed the City’s main site.
SPD says Seattle.gov usually gets 300,000 hits in a day. The interactive crime tool launched on Monday raised that to 3-million.
- The Examiner
—- original post 6/29/10—-
KPLU, the public radio station notes the new Puget Soundkeeper Alliance maps of the region. They cover
- Habitats
- Human Impact
- Water Quality
- Wetlands
- Shellfish Harvesting
The five different maps, all built on VERTICES Mappler app, itself built on Google Maps, basically break down what would be a very long list of GIS layers in four maps with fewer layers. That’s a great start to limit complexity. What I suppose is the “old non-Google maps site” is still online. But, back to the new one… I find some challenges:
- best viewed with IE (some definite issues on Safari)
- Contact button on map does not put full e-mail address into an e-mail program
- Help notes the document is only for members (of what I’m not sure)
- this note in the help is curious: “We reserve the right to edit or delete any information added by the public to the Gulf Coast Oil Spill mapsite.”
- KPLU
There’s a new version of of the W.M. Keck Earth Sciences and Mining Research Center, “The Nevada Geospatial Data Gateway,” a digital map data depository for Nevada. The map created at University of Nevada, Reno was unveiled to to the Nevada State Mapping Advisory Committee at the 20th Annual NGIS Conference in Las Vegas at the annual June meeting. The site
combines ArcGIS Server and Google maps, providing visitors with an intuitive way to access the data. Best of all, it is fast, returning results typically five to six times faster than comparable searches performed on http://www.data.gov.
“Essentially, the new site will allow a visitor to click on a location using Google maps and pull up all the data we have for that area,” Newell said. “It simplifies the process of discovering and using the information. It’s groundbreaking work that needs to be done, which no one else is doing.”
- UNR News
Seattle now has an online crime map built on Bing Maps (as is the city’s My Neighborhood Map public access map). The Seattle PI states: (1) the map is updated each Monday (2) users are asked provide an e-mail address to gain access, and (3) visitors must agree to terms and conditions to use the map. None of those seem to be the current situation based on a visit the app. The app states:
The mapped icons are based on police reports taken by officers when responding to incidents around the city. The time for an incident to show on the map is 12 hours after the report has been processed. However, the time for a report related to the event to be made available online can take 2-3 business days.
