July 2013 Summaries

The City of Melbourne has launched an interactive map visualizing their entire tree database, showcasing the health of the city's trees and enabling users to explore individual tree data. The design was developed in collaboration with OOM Creative, using CartoDB for data management and visualization. A unique aspect of the dataset is its assessment of each tree's useful lifetime expectancy, revealing a "heat-map" of which trees are at risk. The map features colored icons representing different tree types, allowing users to quickly identify tree characteristics when viewed on mobile devices.

There are two times a year when the sun aligns with the midtown street grid in Manhattan, known as Manhattanhenge, and the creator of nychenge.com has built an interface to explore where mini-henges occur across all neighborhoods in NYC. This visualization uses CartoDB 2.1 to display the phenomenon and provides information on how to find your own favorite henge date center on a map. The project aims to use this technology for other cities, such as San Francisco and Madrid, and includes additional features like finding events including one's street. The data used is Open Street Maps, and the alignment of the sun was calculated using the open source SunCalc library. The code is available on GitHub, making it an open-source project.

We have released CartoDB 2.1, which marks a major step forward for the platform with added features, design and usability improvements, and multilayer support. Multilayer support enables the creation of complex web maps by combining new filters, style wizards, and SQL/CartoCSS capabilities. The release aims to simplify intuitive interfaces while allowing users to focus on their data and mapping challenges. This update is expected to open doors for new mappers to create amazing visualizations on the web. Users are encouraged to share their experiences and visualizeations with the platform.