Last Semester I sat in on a course at the University of Michigan taught by Sandra Arlinghaus and Ann Evans titled: Maps and Timelines: The Quest for Peace in the Middle East.

I approached the course as a technologist looking to expand my knowledge of application and techniques of GIS and web mapping for addressing social and environmental issues. It was an interesting experience due to the fact that the rest of the class was primarily education and middle-east studies students, with very little technical capability.

Throughout the course we discussed what Arlinghaus and Evans are calling a “Geomat”, a geographic matrix that formulates a standard ‘recipe’ for building a hypermedia visualization of anthropological issues. This includes both pertinent data: climate, demographics, terrain, resources, economic and social institutions, individual actors, and policy; as well as multiple interface elements: maps, calendrical timelines, individual events of interest, biographies, source documents, and organizational reports.

Overall, this is an excellent concept for how to design an informational and exploration site to document and educate on an issue. Too often a site is full of text that is typically opaque to understanding by the average reader, or simple pretty graphics that are too easy to tell the single-side of a story or mislead and under-represent. Together all of these elements can serve to provide the user with a multifaceted understanding of an issue - from technical to anthropological perspectives, and provide a better analysis capability in which to frame future discussion.

The culmination of the course as building a project around a specific event or issue in the middle east. Inspired by Corrie’s work, I chose to investigate and map the consumer water issues and in general hydrological capabilities and rights that has underpinned most conflicts and discussions between Israel, Palestine, and other countries in the region like Jordan and Egypt.

http://mapsomething.com/demo/waterusage/

The Data

Gathering the data for this project proved to be particularly difficult. After a lot of searching I did start to find some very good static maps generated by the UN and some of the Israeli Agencies. None of these provided the underlying data and as such did not provide a mechanism for investigation or combining with other data.

This actually illustrates part of the problem why there is such conflict over water in the region. Maps tend to be limited in the data they show - either being hydrological maps, or infrastructure maps, or political boundary maps. However, the situation is more complicated and inter-dependent. Issues over security fences and borders typically move boundaries several miles for no apparent reason. When you bring in well locations and other infrastructure, the reasons become very apparent as the fence may be moved to provide access to a small number of wells to one side or the other.

A larger, more prevalent issue is the actual location of the aquifers and the effect that inhabitation and construction has on affecting the quantity and quality of water of residents much further away. All the water from the West Bank (Eastern side of Israel) flows towards the Mediterranean and affects the coastal aquifer. Therefore Palestinian usage and maintenance of this water source affects Israelis, a situation that has obvious unsettled many in Israel and underpins negotations.

Finally I was able to get some very useful data from the Executive Action Team (EXACT) Multilateral Working Group on Water Resources, which is tasked with gathering data and providing analysis and sources for this very issue. In addition, networking with David Katz of the University of Michigan and Michael Eyal of the Hydrological Service of Israel got me better aquifer and stream data. These and more resources are listed on the site here and I’ve also included the converted data formats and uploaded them to Mapufacture.

The Technical

Being a technologist, I wanted to build a ’slick’ way to generate my Geomat with dynamic content from a common data store. It’s been a very long time since I created a “static” site that wasn’t generated from some form of a database.

For the Israel & Palestine Water site I chose to store all the information in KML. The richness of KML allowed me to specify styling, temporal, and other attributes such as actor (country) and category (water, conflict, meeting, individual).

I then built a simple PHP page that parses the KML and populates the map and two timelines. The two timelines has drawn some criticism, but I wanted a way to show both major events for quick navigation - kind of like a shortcut menu, and then a more complete timeline that showed all events on a very fine timescale.

The underlying tools used also included Mapstraction, which made the overlay of markers and polygons for watersheds very easy, and Simile Timeline, which has excellent support for time visualization. Tying the two together was straight-forward and my Javascript was inspired by this Earthquake Map/TImeline demo.

At the end of the project I added a Mapufacture map at the bottom of the page that brings in dynamic and up-to-date news of the region pulled from a variety of sources including news agencies, blogs, and media sharing sites. Ultimately, I would like to overlay this dynamic information onto the primary map, but there are definite issues to be addressed with usability with so much data and making it usable and understandable.

That last part really summarizes the entire issue that Geomats and other design patterns are attempting to resolve. How do you provide for a very rich, and deep, map interface without overwhelming the user and providing mechanisms for exploration and investigation. There is some utilization of the timeline to filter the viewed events, and being able to select markers either geographically or temporally, and have the alternate display centered also aids in guiding the user in connecting the entire set of complex issues.

Also check out the other Maps & Timelines projects, especially Esmaeel Dadashzadeh’s analysis of the efforts to data and investigation of the currently proposed solutions when analyzed using this Geomat multifaceted approach.

Erik Wilde was pointing out the disparities between Google Maps and Google Ditu, or their Chinese version of maps. However, Google Ditu doesn’t have satellite imagery.

There are several easy ways to fix this. The first was to look at the Ditu tiles, and confirm they are the same as Google’s nominal tiling scheme. Which means you can add the China Street tiles as a simple GTileLayerOverlay with Google Maps standard satellite view underneath. This was incredibly easy with Mapstraction and I put up a demo here.

For bonus points I even added a Mapufacture syndicated feed of Erik’s venues for LocWeb2008 and nearby Wikipedia articles from Geonames.

The other way

The terms of how mixing Google’s various tiles together isn’t clear. So the other way to address his issue is to use the freely available data.

Namely, OpenStreetMap for roads, OpenAerialMap or other remote imagery, and run in OpenLayers. Here is the same map done with open data and open source. The resolution or completeness isn’t there yet, but you can see where it’s going and the ability to be use the information as you want is very appealing.

Need to add hyperlocalization to your mashup/site/app? Users searching for “Pizza in Dogpatch” and your geocoder just falls over? Well, Urban Mapping pulled a some what surprising, and incredibly great move today and announced they are opening up the API to their neighborhood database.

If you haven’t heard before, Urban Mapping provides the data to most of the major mapping users on defining areas like “Little Italy”, or “Soho”. This includes Google, MapQuest, and others. By opening their API, third-party developers can now build this type of capability into their own applications. It’s something we’ll definitely be adding to Mapufacture very soon.

There are numerous other geocoders out there, not least of which is the excellent and open GeoNames. However, an API for looking up ambiguous, and changing local definitions of a neighborhood has been missing. UMI fills that by providing multiple mechanisms for finding and defining ‘hoods. For example, you can look up the neighborhoods at a location, by name, or even get the exonyms of a neighborhood, depending on the language. There are a number of other methods and demos available. Check out the very good
documentation that links to each of the demos and even includes code snippets in Ruby and PHP for how to call the API.

As Brady points out on O’Reilly Radar, the API is using SOAP, and not REST. The API was developed just as REST was “becoming all the rage”, but had various reasons for being SOAP based. Still, the code examples show how easy it is to use a SOAP library to create a simple wrapper around the API. [via Brian Suda]

Of course, I’m perhaps a little biased on the Urban Mapping demos and documentation - considering I helped developed them. Urban Mapping is a great company to work with and I’m really looking forward to their continued expansion of their data products and APIs.

Over the past day there has been a large discussion about “what is neogeography” in the geoblogosphere. (more posts). It’s apparent that, given the quick and large-scale response to the original impetus, that this question has been brewing in the minds of many geo-types.

There are many analogies to draw here - and typical to the geoworld they see their situation as newly evolved, yet the same thing has happened in other, less specialist realms for much longer. Look at journalism vs. blogging, movies vs. television, or any number of other field that has had its identity questioned. My feelings are that GIS and Neogeography are in fact different things - but that doesn’t mean they are mutually exclusive.

They have different goals and purposes. Their tools may often overlap, or even be the same in many cases, but probably with much different use cases. As technology advances in a field, and becomes more wide spread, easy to use, and powerful, then tools show up in the general market that enable a broader range of users that don’t have the same experience and values as the original audience. This happened when supercomputers came to your pocket so you could figure out the right tip at dinner or check sports scores. I doubt that’s what Turing had in mind, but that doesn’t make the purpose less important.

An Analogy Extended

A couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation at the University of Kansas on just this topic (slides). One parallel I drew was the concept of potentially emerging field of “Neoeconomics”. You’re an average consumer, planning your family budget. You probably don’t buy GEMODEL 3.2 to figure out how much you can spend on travel. Instead, you pull up a spreadsheet program like Excel and pound away entering numbers. You use the right tool for your job.

However, extend that a little further, what if economists could in fact aggregate everyone’s private budget together and use this information to forecast purchasing trends, GDP and inflation? They would know expected money flow from the general populace. And now, what if, Economists could syndicate that information back down to everyone to utilized in correcting their budgets based on real expectations. There would be a better estimate of your salary, raise, cost of goods, and general economy. Things you care about for you and your family.

This is what is happening in the geospatial community right now. Neogeographers are creating tools and data for their use and goals, and mashing them up and doing all sorts of new (and not so new) activites with these powerful tools. GIS experts are then utilizing these data and tools for analysis, coordination, and decision support. See the power of a mixture of tools like Google MyMaps, Twitter, Flickr, and MODIS satellite data (one of these things isn’t like the others) when put together by a GIS expert for disaster response in the San Diego Fires. Neogeographers, public, and GIS experts working together smoothly. It almost makes me giddy.

So it’s not REST, or GoogleEarth, or any data format, single tool, company, or title that makes something GIS or Neogeography. But that gets back to the question, “What is Neogeography”?

The Definition

In doing research for the GISDay 2007 presentation, I looked at the etymology of other terms with neo- prefix and similar terms like colloquial. Also, in my experience writing the book, giving talks, writing geo-tools, consulting, advising, assisting, chatting, and mapping - and most importantly as part of a complete career shift for me from my previous work, I spent a lot of time pondering the concept of Neogeography.

Based on my above thoughts, it has a kinship with the concept of “GIS” but also has different purposes and goals. So it is necessary to demarcate itself from GIS. To this end, I propose a definition.

At least it’s a succint phrasing of a concept that we can all collectively discuss. And finally, for just a small illustration: If you’re using Tagzania to measure biodiversity of the cuddle-fish, you’re doing GIS - if you’re using ArcGIS to make a map of your summer vacation, you’re doing neogeography.

PS. lazyweb, make me a ‘You might be a neogeographer if…’ like game for this

I spent much of Geography Week and GISDay at the University of Kansas as an invited speaker on ‘Neogeography’. I was lucky enough to meet the coordinator, Josh Campbell, at FOSS4G, and invited to join the illustrious group of speakers, including Geoff Zeiss of Autodesk and Brian Timoney of The Timoney Group. GISDay has often been very technical, or rah-rah ESRI products. Josh had a goal this year to introduce innovations in geospatial technology through use of open-source software and open-standards. Although I will point out that Jeremy Bartley, a member ESRI’s ArcGIS Server development team had an impressive demonstration of their new ArcGIS 9.3 and the ability to integrate with web mapping platforms and open-standards.

Aimee Stewart gave a really intriguing presentation on LifeMapper, employing OGC interfaces and distributed computing for biodiversity modeling. I’m hoping she’ll submit a topic to Where2.0 2008. Jude Kastens‘ talk on flood mapping was very pertinent considering recent disasters and very threatening dams in Mosul and Three-Gorges.

My presentation slides are available here. They are slightly condensed, as they re-used some of my GeoStack slides from Where2.0, so left them out of this export. My goal was to address the increasing discussion, and questions around “What is Neogeography, and how does it fit with traditional GIS and cartography?”.

| View | Upload your own

To this end, and inspired by my visit to the historic maps showcased at the Festival of Maps, I gave a brief history of cartography (as I understand it) and how Neogeography can be viewed as a resurgence in ‘colloquial cartography’. I will write more on this later, but I was struck by many similarities between previous mapping efforts of ancient and medieval peoples and neogeography of today. Storytelling, ephemeral location markers, and emergence of new wayfinding schemes have repeated themselves with various rounds of technology and culture.

Based on this contextualing of Neogeography, I then offered a proposed, first draft, definition and illustrated various means by which Neogeography has led the way in providing an understandable, user-centric interface to powerful geospatial technology. This has been most recently, and very powerfully, demonstrated with Christopher Schmidt’s San Diego Fire map that employed MODIS satellite imagery, LandSat basemap, Flickr images, Google MyMaps documentation from citizens and news agencies, OpenStreetMap roads, and PictEarth Aerial images, to provide a usable, up-to-date, accurate, information on the occuring disaster.

An Evaluation

I was definitely concerned, going into the day, how my message would be received. I wasn’t sure of the audience, but assumed it would consist primarily of Geography Students and Professors, both of whom are typically ensconced in proprietary, ‘old-school’ solutions. Both because those are the tools they know and have data formatted for, and because they typically don’t have to pay for the potentially expensive licenses. And like typical academics, they rarely have to be concerned with general public-facing usage of their software or results.

The presentation went “well”, in a I didn’t fall over success, but I felt there was some broad understanding but not necessarily a deep connection with what I was saying and trying to convey. I did get follow up from the non-geographers in the room that they found my presentation really enlightening and gave them inspiration and material to start investigating adding geo* to their particular application. This is exactly the kind of person that needs to connect with Geographers and GIS experts. I guess the medium will be ’slippy maps’ and ’spinny globes’ and more importantly, common open-data standards such as GeoRSS and KML.

On Thursday I gave a 2-hour workshop/tutorial on Neogeography. This was another strange presentation to prepare for. I had to remove a lot of basic material from my slide deck. I could safely assume a Ph.D. Geography student knew what “latitude and longitude” meant, and how projections worked. However, they probably (and in reality didn’t) have much experience creating webpages, FTP, or Javascript. My personal goal was for the attendees to walk away knowing how to take the KML files they created from Brian Timoney’s tutorial and be able to display them online via Mapstraction or OpenLayers. We had success.

Two-way street

I really did enjoy the entire trip, simply because I enjoy talking with people and sharing ideas, but also because the exposure to a large group of GIS users was such an enlightening experience. Typically in my previous meetings and conferences I’m either surrounded by other Neogeographer-types or even non-geospatial people. I still think there is a long-way to go to convince GIS users where and how they fit into the new tools, and how Neogeographers have a lot to learn on how to properly, and powerfully, engage geospatial technology.