June 2015 Summaries

Anthony Goddard's project, ZeroSixZero, creates custom real-time tracking maps for expeditions and adventurers. The process involves syncing data from trackers to CartoDB, adding visualizations such as route lines, category colors, and images, and incorporating additional layers like weather overlays and audio recordings of phonecasts. By leveraging tools like Odyssey.js and Cartodb.js, Goddard's project enables highly customized tracking maps that push the boundaries of adventure mapping, allowing viewers to feel close to the adventure they're following.

The Supreme Court of the United States announced on June 26, 2015, that same-sex marriage is now legal in all states, marking a significant milestone in the fight for equality. To celebrate this momentous occasion, CartoDB created a Torque Category map using its Twitter API to visualize trending hashtags related to the ruling. The map features color-coded hashtags representing the Rainbow Flag hues and was released during Pride Week in major U.S. cities. This decision is a testament to the power of data mapping and the importance of promoting justice and equality.

Roger is a seasoned professional with 15 years of experience in the public sector, bringing expertise as a practitioner-educator and solution sales consultant on the use of technology and GIS platforms to improve government operations. He holds degrees in Environmental Sciences and Urban and Regional Planning from Rutgers University, where he also taught courses in GIS and public policy. Roger's passion for public service and his belief in the critical role of technology in enabling effective decision-making have driven his career path, including leading North American business development at CartoDB. His experiences as a Co-Founder and President of a non-profit organization in Jersey City, where he successfully navigated complex land use issues through collaboration and finding common ground, have had a lasting impact on his approach to problem-solving. With a strong background in GIS and public policy, Roger is well-equipped to leverage technology to drive positive change in the public sector.

With the deprecation of Google Earth API and Earth Enterprise, many users are looking for alternative solutions to provide a 3D environment for geographical information. CartoDB can be a viable option, offering features like on-the-fly data retrieval using complex spatial SQL queries and advanced cartographic capabilities through CartoCSS. The combination of CartoDB with Cesium provides a perfect match, leveraging the benefits of modern open web architecture based on reliable APIs and decoupled components. This setup allows for the use of CartoDB's imagery provider to fetch tiles and GeoJSON features using SQL API, making it a complete use case for all platform components. The example showcases a layer selector with customizable base layers, tiled sources, and vector sources, including PostGIS functions to retrieve centroid points. Cesium supports Mapbox geojson simplestyle spec but allows overriding the default pin image. The example also demonstrates controlling layer visibility events and feature clicks, enabling the movement of information panels to pin positions. This setup is easily extensible, with custom infowindows and metadata available for features, inviting users to experiment and contribute to the ecosystem.

Stuart Lynn joins CartoDB as a Map Scientist, bringing his background in astrophysics to develop intuitive and powerful web interfaces for citizen science research. With experience in developing software for projects like Zooniverse, where he helped create web interfaces for large data volumes, Stuart is now channeling his inquisitiveness to enhance scientific museum and social good sectors through CartoDB's tools. He aims to understand how people derive understanding from playing with maps and develop tools that accelerate and ease that process. With a passion for exploring complex information through data visualization, particularly maps, Stuart hopes to make better choices by augmenting human intuition. His experience includes working on projects like OldWeather, PlanetHunters, and the Journal Of Brief Ideas platform.

CartoDB uses PostGIS, a powerful add-on for PostgreSQL, to enable spatial database functionality. The blog series focuses on replicating popular GIS software functions using PostGIS queries. Two initial functions covered are Convex Hull and Buffer. A Convex Hull is generated by stretching out a rubber band around a set of points to create the smallest convex polygon that can contain them, useful for highlighting patterns in data or visualizing coverage areas. CartoDB's ST_ConvexHull() function generates a convex hull from a collection of geometries, while SQL statements are used to collect individual points into a geometry collection and transform the result to web mercator coordinates for mapping. A Buffer is created by running a specified distance around another geometry or group of geometries, useful for visual elements on maps or further spatial queries. CartoDB's ST_Buffer() function generates buffers from a geography type column, which can be dissolved into a single feature using ST_Union(). The functions are demonstrated using QGIS and CartoDB datasets, providing examples of how PostGIS can enable efficient data analysis and mapping in GIS software.

The CartoDB team, in partnership with DigitalGlobe, took the first-ever high-resolution satellite selfie from space during the State of The Map US Conference. This was made possible by using DigitalGlobe's WorldView-3 Satellite, which provides incredibly crisp and current imagery. The satellite captured a pixel-sized image of approximately 31 centimeters, taking a picture near Cape Cod and Rhode Island while traveling at speeds of over 17,500 miles per hour. The images were downlinked and processed in just a few hours, and CartoDB is making this type of satellite imagery easily accessible to its users through its Beta Program and future editor updates.

The GDELT API is a powerful tool that allows users to create customized data feeds, build interactive maps, and analyze media coverage in various languages. With the API, users can focus on specific topics, organizations, or people, and create rich and animated maps that span multiple months or involve complex queries. Google BigQuery houses a copy of GDELT, which enables users to create truly awesome maps that plot worldwide locations mentioned in global news coverage monitored by GDELT. The platform also allows for comparison of news sources, tracking of media outlets, and mapping of topics and stories. Additionally, the Automatic Source Location Georeferencing datasets can be used to estimate country-level geographic location of news outlets, enabling users to map how different countries portray various topics.

The State of the Map US 2015 conference was held at the United Nations headquarters, bringing together a community of innovative thinkers in the mapping world. CartoDB participated and engaged with attendees, providing support and resources to help make the event run smoothly. The company's team members were visible throughout the weekend, including Aurelia Hayley and Santiago, who helped navigate attendees between talks and activities. CartoDB also supported Maptime, a global movement of mapmakers and geo-learners, by hosting a pizza lunch at NYU's ITP. The event concluded with a sense of camaraderie among attendees, who will now return to their regular day jobs with renewed enthusiasm for the mapping community.

Am I Rent Stabilized? is a web application that helps New York City tenants find out if their landlord may be illegally overcharging them for a rent-stabilized apartment and motivates them to take action. The app was developed by Chris Henrick, who used open data as a prompt for civic action rather than solely for visualization and analysis. The app uses a database of properties that are likely to have rent-stabilized apartments and recommends a course of action to users. It also provides information on local tenants' rights organizations operating in the user's neighborhood and allows users to input their address to geocode and find nearby organizations. The data was processed using Python, PostgreSQL, and CartoDB, and includes custom polygon geospatial data representing each organization's service area.

2015: The Year of Pizza! is an initiative by CartoDB to support their mapping communities around the world. This year, they will be buying pizza for a world of Maptime Meetup mappers every month. The goal is to elevate their fellow mappers and build a vibrant culture of mapping. CartoDB aims to provide a fun and supportive environment where new and experienced mapmakers can share ideas and collaborate on projects. The initiative is part of CartoDB's effort to foster a sense of community among map enthusiasts, both online and offline.

The GDELT Project is an ambitious initiative that processes a significant fraction of the world's news media in real-time, identifying various metadata indicators such as people, locations, organizations, themes, sources, emotions, counts, quotes, and events driving global society. The project creates a free, open platform for computing on the entire world's news media, utilizing machine translation to translate content from 65 languages, accounting for 98.4% of media found daily. This data is used to create one of the largest multilingual geocoding platforms, identifying and rendering geographic coordinates for over 10 million places worldwide. The GDELT Project offers a vast array of information about global human society, with datasets available in open format for immediate download. It has been explored using CartoDB to produce maps and visualizations, such as the animated map exploring the geography of protests, cyber activity, and unrest, or the real-time map displaying the world's happiest and saddest news. The GDELT Project is a powerful tool for mapping the world's news media in real-time, with opportunities for customization and multilayer query mashups using the API or hourly data resources.

The European Bird Census Council is launching a new project called EBP to support Europe's Green Week 2015, aiming to understand bird distributional patterns across large geographical areas using data from online bird recording portals. The EBP combines vast amounts of data and promotes protocols for data sharing and analysis, utilizing CartoDB to create a common data repository and layer multiple data sets spatially and chronologically. The project's objective is to provide free access to animated distributional maps that highlight the scope and potential of the EBP project, with over 1.5 million map combinations available by the end of the year. This initiative explores the possibilities of collecting and presenting citizen science online and examines how online information about nature conservation can better meet the needs of administrations, businesses, and the public.