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.