James Killick, over at Map Happenings, contemplates whether we’re witnessing the end of consumer maps:
It’s all part of a trend, a downward trend in my opinion, that will result demise of consumer maps. Contrary to Beck’s approach to distill reality into its essential essence we’re moving in the opposite direction.
We are instead on a path to the dreaded metaverse, a virtual world where we should all be thankful and glad to wander around as legless avatars with the aspirational goal of reaching social media nirvana. I don’t know about you, but, ugh.
Sure, Zuck wants us all to stay home and spend all our money inside his multi-player game instead of going on holidays and exploring places.
But no matter what, we’ll continue to go places, and navigating unfamiliar territory will always involve maps. These maps will look different from what we’re using today. More real-time information will be involved, more data capturing sentiments and our phone cameras will play a vital role.
Is it really that bad if future maps don’t resemble those made by Harry Beck or the Ordnance Survey in the olden days? I don’t think so; it’s called progress. I remember arriving in London almost ten years ago. Citymapper was a godsend. Even though you rarely ever looked at a map, it made this humongous city approachable to a boy from a small-ish town in East Germany.
Whether future solutions can be called maps as defined by the National Geographic Society doesn’t matter. Whether we old people like the look of digital way-finding tools doesn’t matter either. What matters is that they make cities easier to explore and navigate for the majority of people.
Because it seems like Twitter is on the cusp of extinction,
I’ve set up a Mastodon account over at Mapstodon—like everyone else. I will primarily cross-post the same updates on Twitter and Mastodon. Follow along for the ride at @latlong@mapstodon.space.
The Map is a short documentary about a revolutionary redesign of New York City’s iconic subway map. Filmmaker Gary Hustwit documents the process as digital agency Work & Co works with the MTA to create a new “live map” — one that updates in real-time — to help New Yorkers and tourists better plan their journeys. The film examines the evolution of wayfinding and user interfaces, and shows how good design and the latest digital technology can simplify one of the world’s most complex transit systems.
To create a standard base map that anyone can contribute to and benefit from, the TomTom Maps Platform is bringing together a pool of map content from map users around the world. The resulting geolocation database – the largest available today – feeds continuous improvements back to the map, helping it keep up with reality.
The pool is filled with an array of sources, including OpenStreetMap, sensor-derived observations (SDO) from millions of vehicles, probe data and shared points of interest (POI). It’s a dizzying amount of data that we quickly make sense of, validate and act on.
There’s a marketing page and a video featuring dramatic music and Steve Coast saying very little: “Maps are used way more than people think but it’s invisible to us. As things get quicker, we have to change the way we think about maps.”
Is this new product primarily OpenStreetMap data and some additional data sprinkled on top? Does it have an API? Map tiles? An SDK? It’s hard to tell as the material was written by marketing people for people in suits.
We will have to wait for further announcements to understand what TomTom’s new map platform can do.
A design proposal for the modularization of the map rendering architecture can be found at #547. This modularization will allow new rendering architectures to be implemented quickly and more easily, and we anticipate that the modularization will give us a concrete framework to better interrogate various migration strategies.
I love this approach, gathering feedback from the community before starting the work to make actual changes to the code and architecture.
The program from this year’s Pacific Geospatial Conference in Fiji has been released. The focus of the 2022 editing is less on technology but on applications to problems specific to the Pacific region. For a pleasant change, the list of presenters doesn’t include the usual suspects from the industry.
NACIS, the North American Cartographic Information Society, have uploaded recordings of this year’s annual meeting in Minneapolis. The playlist contains over 100 videos covering all sessions from the meeting.
Greg Miller, writing for Wired Magazine, in a portrait of Cynthia Brewer, of Colorbrewer fame:
Brewer’s influence on cartography is far-ranging. Others have imitated her approach, developing a TypeBrewer and a Map Symbol Brewer. She’s seen her color schemes in everything from financial charts to brain imaging studies.
It’s a portrait in one of the most renowned technology publications of a university professor working on a rather niche subject — goes to show how much influence Brewer’s work has on our craft.
The fine folks at Crunchy Data have lined up a great set of talks for a one-day conference celebrating this year’s PostGIS day on 17 November. It’s an online event, with sessions scheduled for over twelve hours; wherever you in the world and whenever you’re awake that day, you can drop in at any time. The event is free and registration is now open.
Workflows, a new workflow builder introduced by Carto, allows people to build geo-data-processing workflows without writing code. It simplifies the creation of nested SQL queries. It provides means to import data from an external service or send the processing result via email.
The full extent of capabilities is pretty sparse at the moment. Workflows is currently in private beta; the public beta will be released in the “coming weeks.”