MapBrief™

The launch of Google Maps in 2005 brought with it a new way to think about web maps: “tiles”.  Lots of tiles.  Actually, millions of tiles.  The smooth panning and zooming were awesome, but keeping track of all of those 256 x 256px PNG images was, frankly, a chore.  Even with a computer. And the purists amongst us chafed as this mongrel projection “web mercator”–not exactly conformal, not really Mercator–became the de facto standard.

"Web Mercator?" If your loxodromes aren't straight, keep my name out of your mouth.

So what mapping industry titan would rise up and liberate us from the tyranny of web mercator in the browser?

A guy in California who works for the…The New York Times?

D3.js:  Data Driven Documents

D3 is a javascript library that not only does choropleths, proportional symbols, etc. in the browser (no IE 6-8; we can’t wait up forever), but a stunning array of other types of visualizations.  Which is essential because even we mappers realize that sometimes the best map isn’t a map. A Swiss-army knife of data-display possibility to complement our everyday cudgeling of points, lines, and polygons.

May I Interest You In Some Peirce Quincuncial?

BREAKING:  Projections are back in the browser.

And how!

Those of us of a certain age remember when the education crisis wasn’t basic reading and ‘rithmitic but America’s school children staring at Mercator maps and getting distorted impressions of the relative sizes of continents. And being too impressed with Greenland.  Now we can dazzle impressionable youth with the manifold ways to display an oblate spheroid on a flat screen.

Or heck, just go all in on a spheroid, and spin it, inside your browser.

Cro$$over Skill$

As map-making goes mainstream, geo professionals need to cultivate a skillset less niche and more in demand by those outside the geo silo.  D3–because of its versatility and variety–is much in demand.  A fair grasp of it combined with data munging skills, and you’re looking at a $15K bump in market-value (or your money back).

Small Steps, Incremental Absorption

But that $15K isn’t free money.  D3 has moving parts and a conceptual framework that needs grokking before the cool stuff happens.  Your go-to technique of “COPY-PASTE, TWEAK-‘N-HOPE” isn’t the play here.  Fortunately there are a ton of resources and a new book: with patience and lots of view-source-ing, you’ll be in infoviz-creating mode in due time.

The Tyndale Revolution in Online Mapping

D3 will only accelerate the process that Google kicked off in 2005: the radical democratization of cartography on the web.  In creating the first English translation of the Bible using the new tools of mass publishing, Tyndale effectively broke up the monopoly of the small, elite, Latin-reading guild.  (And got burned at the stake for his trouble–stuff happens.)  Geospatial professionals had a sort of monopoly on map-making: complicated software and obscure data formats kept the guild comfortably small.  Now we see patient explanations of what a shapefile is geared towards the tech-savvy but otherwise uncredentialed outsider. Anyone with a browser and a text-editor can now make compelling maps and distribute them to the utter ends of the earth.  If you’re an industry veteran in this uncertain, sequestered professional environment, you can either devote your energies to pining for a cozy, less demanding past or jump head first into the creative flourishing of a New Golden Age of Cartography that has already arrived.

—Brian Timoney

To celebrate the International Open Data Hackathon Day, I’d like to point out that tomorrow marks the 2nd Anniversary of the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management taking key portions of their GeoCommunicator website offline.  Behold the takedown notice.

So what's the BLM been doing for the last two years?

I’ve blogged about 18 months ago, admittedly with the naive belief that it would get sorted out eventually.   With key datasets pertaining to Oil & Gas leases, mining claims, etc., an ordinary citizen might assume that the problems would be addressed with a modicum of urgency.

The Public Loses Access, But Someone Still Got Paid

But decreased access to BLM data hasn’t been a loss for everyone.  Premier Geospatial, the private sector entity that has the closest relationship with the BLM in the realm of Oil & Gas lease data, sold itself (under its parent entity Xedar) to the international data vendor IHS for…$28  million. A nice payday for someone.

Closed government data is profitable for the chosen few

Which Side Do You Bet On?

While the democratic idealism of open government information is pleasant to ponder, as a business person investing in products and applications built on top of open data you have to make a hard-headed assessment.  Namely, is a government entity’s commitment to the free flow information credible over the long-term?  Or is it ever vulnerable to changing political winds: a new White House administration, a new City Council, a different set of county commissioners?

In the case of the BLM, the smart money turned out to be on bureaucratic dysfunction and intransigence.

Whether the Open Data movement is currently gaining or losing momentum is great fodder for Internet argument. But folks risking their own dollars might well be waiting for the day when the “movement” is backed by real statutory muscle.  Absent a legal compliance structure with teeth, there’s little to protect open data from the worst instincts of those in the public sector who forget too quickly who pays their salaries.

—Brian Timoney

“Why Map Portals Don’t Work” is a five-part exploration of why the dominant visual grammar of GIS interfaces serves its public audience so poorly and continues to diverge from the best practices found most everywhere else on the web. Read Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV.  On February 27th, I will be joining James Fee for an online conversation about this series at SpatiallyAdjusted.com.

What’s worth waiting for on the web?

Search Twitter for “Hulu ads” and see how much folks enjoy just sitting through a brief ad to get to high quality broadcast television content.

Then imagine what is going through your users’ minds while your map portal is loading.  Puzzlement?  Irritation? Or a sense of eager anticipation?

You know which it isn’t.

And why exactly, is all of that prolonged loading and plugin-requiring necessary?  To push content and functionality of little interest to the vast majority of users.  Because makers of map portals for the general public fundamentally misunderstand what users want.  They want rapid search-and-retrieval with their results contextualized on a map.  The map plays a supporting role–it’s not the lead actor.  So if you’re forcing your users to interact with toolbars and map navigation before they get their answer, you have your users’ priorities backwards.

Adobe, the makers of Flash and Flex, has (had?) a marketing pitch about using their products to author “immersive” web experiences.  And as hardworking geospatial professionals, who doesn’t want to author an immersive experience?  For users, however, immersion feels a whole lot like being lost and confused.  They want your site to work like the rest of the web where they might hit a dozen or more sites in quick succession—gleaning a fact here, an opinion there, and hopefully an OMG hilarious cat video somewhere else. And as we mentioned in a previous post, the 10-15% of your users craving an immersive map portal experience already have Google Earth: give them a KML link and send them on their way.

So let’s flip the script and instead of structuring our web mapping experience around an inappropriate desktop GIS idiom, let’s take the value of our users’ time as the guiding principle:

• How quickly can you deliver parcel/assessment info to a property owner?
• How quickly can a parent moving to your municipality find the nearest elementary school?
• How fast can you show an investor the ten most recent commercial property transactions in your city?

Previous posts in this series have detailed specific techniques for focusing user engagement based on actual map usage data.  But even without metrics, ask yourself the hardest question of all: would you visit your own map portal if there was a simpler, faster alternative? The 8th most trafficked website in the US is Craigslist.  It’s ugly, it’s crowded, it’s literally nothing but hyperlinks.  But millions everyday without training, without reading PDF Help documentation, find it useful.

Useful.

Dare to turn away from over a decade of misguided map portal habits and create something useful.

—Brian Timoney