April 2014 Summaries

This Map of the Week showcases extensive information about private contributions in the 2013 primary legislative elections in Argentina, visualized using CartoDB. The map is based on original data from the Cámara Nacional Electoral and includes geocoded information about each contributor, party aggregations, and a custom basemap. A bubble visualization is used to represent the amount of money contributed by each person, with color-coded bubbles indicating party affiliation. The infowindow provides additional details such as district names, contributor names, and amounts given, as well as links to external tax registration sites for contributors.

A free workshop will be held on May 6th in Madrid from 19:00 to 20:15 at the CartoDB Madrid office, focusing on utilizing CartoDB for rapid prototyping and data visualization using open data. The event is intended as preparation for the EcoHack later in the week. Registration is required, but it will also guarantee access to beer.

Google Street View is a service that provides panoramic views of streets worldwide, allowing users to visualize locations in detail. The service features a simple-to-use API that enables developers to integrate it into their applications, such as CartoDB. By using the Google Street View API, developers can add interactive and visually engaging infowindows with images from the service to their maps. This integration is particularly useful for city datasets and cases where precise coordinates are available, enabling users to see detailed views of locations in 3D. The process involves constructing a link to an image from the Google Street View API using latitude and longitude or other location-based information, and styling the infowindow with the added image column. This integration can be customized further by defining options such as pitch and using addresses directly instead of coordinates.

There is no doubt that we live on an ever-changing planet, Earth Observation provides a great tool to monitor and track these changes. NASA's daily satellite imagery is freely available online and now can be used as basemaps in CARTO, allowing for near real-time visualizations of the entire earth or specific dates. The Global Imagery Browse Services provide two images available on CARTO: one for the day and one for the night, with a latency period of 5 to 9 hours from satellite image acquisition to public access. This feature makes it perfect for visual storytelling and Earth analysis, enabling scientists, journalists, and storytellers to combine imagery with their own data or other available open data to create insightful maps.

As Facebook acquires Moves, users can leverage CartoDB to visualize and analyze their location data, making it easier to understand their daily activity patterns. By exporting Moves data in various formats and uploading it to CartoDB, users can gain insights into the level of detail available for their activities, allowing them to style and filter their data for a more accurate self-visualization.

EcoHack is a global event that aims to improve our environment using technology and great ideas, where participants build tools, create visualizations, and tell stories about the environment and science. The event has grown into a global phenomenon happening in multiple locations worldwide, including New York, San Francisco, São Paulo, and Madrid, on May 9-10. Past events have featured diverse projects, such as creating data visualizations, building kites, and mapping forest loss, showcasing the flexible format and meaningful outcomes of the event. This year, CartoDB will provide free resources to participants, including a free workshop on how to use their platform for hackathons, further enhancing the experience.

The author, Dmitriy Skougarevskiy, created an interactive online map using CartoDB and Mapbox to visualize the "doughnut holes" in international waters, specifically the loopholes in the Law of the Sea. The doughnut holes are areas beyond 200 nautical miles from a coastline where both countries have a claim but neither can exclusively exploit marine resources. To create the map, Skougarevskiy used CartoDB to display the seabed profile and EEZ boundaries, which were obtained from an ESRI shapefile. He then added colors to the EEZs based on their sovereignty, using CartoCSS to style the polygons. The map also includes infowindows with information about each doughnut hole, including its location, description, and sources. Interactivity is enabled through hover effects, zooming, and clicking on individual doughnut holes. The resulting map provides a unique visual representation of these complex international waters.

CartoDB has launched new Public Pages, showcasing amazing visualizations from great users, including LifeWatch INBO and Simon Rogers' Twitter Data. The platform also highlights the work of Geoplex, an Australian CartoDB partner. Users can create their own Public Pages by selecting visualizations and tables to list, with some limitations on free users to avoid going back to previous settings. CartoDB invites all users to showcase their work and encourages new users to start visualizing their data today.

The new CartoDB Public Pages provide a unique URL for each user or organization, allowing anyone to discover and interact with their public visualizations and data. This feature enables users to showcase their work, share ideas, and collaborate more easily, while also providing access to raw data tables used in visualizations. Paying users can control the privacy settings for their content, and free accounts have limitations on older content that was created before April 7th, 2014. The new Public Pages are designed to be easily browsable and discoverable, with many possibilities for inspiration, collaboration, and reuse of open data.

I was looking for information about food banks in Spain, but the only reliable source I could find was the FESBAL website. To collect more data, I decided to create a project to map all food banks in Spain using CartoDB. With Python and BeautifulSoup, I scraped data from FESBAL's website and imported it into a CartoDB table. I then used CartoDB's georeference tool to automatically geocode the addresses of the food banks. Next, I created a visualization of the map and played with the wizards to customize the appearance. The resulting map was embedded on a website created with Sinatra using Foundation CSS for the layout. The web also integrated with CartoDB using SQL API, allowing visitors to add more food banks. New food banks can be added by submitting data in a specific format, which is explained in the code snippet. The project is available online and can be used for free on my GitHub account.