The last 2 days have been filled with coordinating various efforts in gathering information and volunteers responding to the massive Haiti earthquakes of January 12. The analysis team at FortiusOne has put together a news dashboard highlighting the event and current response efforts.

There have been several tremendous groups that have actively been contributing data and tools both with remote developers and responders on the ground. CrisisMappers, CrisisCommons, Ushahidi, OpenStreetMap, just to name a few.

Many data providers have been making their data freely available. This is most notable when looking at Mikel’s screenshots of OpenStreetMap before the quake and after volunteers began tracing over historic maps and newer satellite imagery from Digital Globe and GeoEye.

Other efforts:

• Ushahidi Haiti is crowd-sourcing reports. You can send a text message to 447624802524, send an email to haiti@ushahidi.com, or send a tweet with the hashtag/s #haiti or #haitiquake.
• The CrisisCommons Wiki has a list of available data and organizations
• Sahana has a form to list offices and organizations that are working on the ground
• GeoCommons search for Haiti has all the datasets and maps that people have contributed for download as Spreadsheet, Shapefile, KML, and more
• OpenStreetMap’s Project Haiti has a list of datasets and people tracing data

It’s time for the FortiusOne GeoCommons team to expand again – and we’re looking for an incredibly bright, hard working, and team oriented engineer to head up our operations team.

GeoCommons is unique among most web applications – it isn’t just deployed to the public web, but also to intranets, the cloud, and to the field. We have servers running in Jalabad, Afghanistan and Nairobi, Kenya, we help develop technology solutions within the Federal government and Intel, and work with Academia, disaster response, and major corporations.

Are you an engineer who likes playing with new technology and solving hard problems? Do you love writing Linux scripts that can deal with massively horizontally scaled servers or compressing systems to run on USB sticks? Do you have a passion for open data, open-source software, collaborative government, and cutting-edge technologies that help the world? An interest in mapping is obviously a plus.

Ping us through the blog, twitter, LinkedIn, email, or stop by our offices in Arlington VA to chat directly. And no, we don’t need any recruiters.

With GeoCommons, we want to make it incredibly easy to not only share geospatial data and build maps, but to actually do something with these maps. Visualizations have a context, and have many different facets at which to look at a datasets, or any number of combinations of data, characteristics, and displays.

We’ve been experimenting with a number of different ways to do this, and all the time building it on top of our own API so that we know other will be able to create their own sites and visualizations just as easily. After all, why would we want to make our job harder or easier than we would expect of any user or developer?

Our first iteration of this was just launched and focuses on investigating the economy, stimulus plans, and housing issues as the Obama Administration works through it’s first hundred days. The Obamameter pulls from a collection of GeoCommons Maker! maps around each of these topics and automatically builds the site.

News moves fast – both emerging stories as well as evolving sagas. We wanted to make it fast and seamless to build an initial news dashboard for breaking events and for our team to add or modify maps as the news unfolds. That way viewers can easily stay up to date. Sean shares some more details on the facets of the dashboard as well as the easy to use administrative interface.

Peeking at the wiring

What you (if you tend to read my blog) may find more interesting are some of the details on how our API is working to enable this kind of quick site generation (yes, you can use the word mashup). We’re definitely not ready to fully push out our API – there is still a lot of tape, hot solder, and bits that we don’t feel comfortable making other developers endure – and more importantly rewrite their code – until it’s solid.

As Sean showed in the admin interface, the site builder just identifies tags, and optionally a user, to pull maps from. This queries our OpenSearch enabled search and asks for GeoJSON response. Matt then wrote some slick and unobtrusive JavaScript to dynamically build these into menus and include the controls for loading new maps. Our data team can continue to maintain their maps and data in GeoCommons and the Dashboard will dynamically update with this new information.

All the underlying data and maps are freely available via GeoCommons Finder! so please download your own copies and investigate the data. We hope this behavior is a model for how the government itself can benefit citizens through open, and easy, sharing of data.

Overall, it’s quite a simple solution to what is typically seen as a very complex, or opaque problem. We’ll be documenting more soon on the various tools and how other can do the same for their own dashboards and sites.

Over the last month I’ve been heads down busy with a large new release of GeoCommons. We’re still finishing up a number of the features, but wanted to share a sneak-peak of a particularly relevant one.

Last night CloudMade publicly premiered their new developer tools based on the OpenStreetMap data. It’s exciting to see friends and peers successfully go from concept, to global community, to launching a company and great line-up of products.

Of particular interest to us at GeoCommons is the custom cartography tools that CloudMade has developed. The power and capability of OpenStreetMap is hard to deny, but a common observation is the lack of visually appealing design – or at least the Euro-centrist assumptions made when viewing North American tiles.

With GeoCommons, we spend a lot of time thinking about proper cartography, and visualization. We already support the major tile providers such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Road, Aerial, Terrain via the great open-source ModestMaps library. However, there are still limitations and assumptions to the base cartography in these tiles. AxisMaps has a good discussion of the technicalities in choosing semi-transparent colors for a Choropleth that look good on tiles.

GeoCommons integration with CloudMade tile services from GeoCommons on Vimeo.

Now with CloudMade’s customized map tiles our users will be able to design and import these custom tiles as basemaps in GeoCommons. You can see the demo that was part of the launch event in this video.

We’re really excited with all of CloudMade’s tools – and wish them the best success.

I’m excited to finally post about the launch of GeoCommons newest application, Maker!. It has been awhile in the making and the team is proud of what we’ve created.

The goal of Maker is to push the boundaries of web mapping to provide easy to use and powerful cartographic design tools along with access to a huge amount of complex geospatial data. We’ve integrated Maker into Finder!, so any interesting or datasets can be immediately dropped into a map, customized and styled.

Geographic Visualization

There has been a lot of discussion on the differences in viewpoints of mapping from traditional geographers and cartographers when faced with Where2.0 tools. In general, map applications have done a lot of work creating digital versions of physical maps and also throwing hundreds of markers onto a slippy map. But that was just the beginning. We worked with AxisMaps to create an understandable and accurate cartographic design interface. Hopefully the result is a more versed public in the proper use of map design as well as push traditional experts into considering new possibilities.

Current map interface are quite limited in their ability to display large and interactive data sets. It is getting better with better Javascript engines, so there is a future – but current implementations cope by rendering static image overlays. The result are often non-interactive or explorable maps. This was the reason to use Flash as the map engine in Maker!. It’s used solely for map rendering – and not overdone as can happen in many “Flash applications”. The data and metadata is fully available as parsable, findable, open formats.

Pushing KML

Another key aspect of the openness of GeoCommons is the key feature to export your maps as styled KML. This means you can build up a rich cartographic visualization, export to KML and open in something like GoogleEarth or WorldWind and retain the styling. This was a goal of the OGC OWS-5 testbed that I wrote about quite extensively. The styling is actually sort of difficult due to the design of KML itself. In the future, it would be quite nice to have better handling of rules or cascading styling that also linked to attributes in ExtendedData.

A step in the right direction

Maker! is really meant to push what is possible in Where2.0 – but it’s just the beginning. It is a great geographic visualization and interrogation tool, but we have much more planned. When Mapufacture joined with FortiusOne this summer, I talked about the potential of combining the whole range of data from complex and authoritative to dynamic and personalized. The maps and data should be accessible via a variety of interfaces, annotatable, analyzable, and more.

Please give Maker! a try – and let me know what you think. Even better, send me some of your maps – I’d love to feature some. I’ll be sharing mine on my GeoCommons profile.