Robin Hawkes - Spatial Awareness (Page 9)

Raluca Nicola

If you’re into 3D maps or Web-mapping in general then you need to be following Raluca Nicola. She works on the ArcGIS API for JavaScript and outputs a constant stream of amazing 3D visualisations. I also featured some of her work in the

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Slides and videos from the NOAA 2019 Geospatial Summit

A large number of slides and videos have been released from this year’s NOAA Geospatial Summit, primarily focused on geodesy and related fields. 2019 Geospatial Summit | National Geodetic Survey

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Transitland

If you work with transit data you may be aware of GTFS. This format allows transit authorities to share structured information about their networks and vehicles in a common format. Transitland makes finding and extracting data from those feeds a breeze. TransitlandA community-edited data

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UK places, buildings and constituencies

Alasdair Rae has compiled and shared a variety of data related to the UK, including places, buildings and constituencies. A reminder of some data I've shared - 42,000 places of Great Britain (shp, geojson, gpkg) https://t.co/k9uY3105xv - Buildings

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High-res data updates to Living Atlas World Elevation Layers

Esri have updated their terrain layers with much higher resolution data, making a huge difference in some parts of the world. High resolution data updates to Living Atlas World Elevation Layers (June 2019)Rajinder NagiArcGIS Blog

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Magnetic north continues its march to the east

An insightful article from Ordnance Survey on the difference between grid north (vertical lines on an OS map) and magnetic north (where a compass points). This difference is constantly moving due to fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field. Magnetic north continues its march

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Real-time route optimisation with Location Intelligence

This article from Carto looks into the issue of efficient routing for on-demand services that don’t have the luxury of delaying deliveries until the following day. It’s very detailed and looks into the algorithms that are required for achieving this. On-demand last

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How our GIS team moved to open source systems

It’s great to see that the Registers of Scotland managed to escape from proprietary mapping platforms. To achieve this they undertook training in QGIS and PostGIS and spent a large amount of time re-writing Python scripts to move away from modules like arcpy.

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Vintage shaded relief in Photoshop

I featured this map from Carl Churchill last week and challenged him to write a tutorial for it. Just a few days later he got back to me with a link to his first ever tutorial. Amazing! Vintage Shaded Relief in Photoshop

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You can use FME Desktop for free for personal use

Did you know that you can use FME for free for non-commercial and non-production purposes? I didn’t! This was exciting news for me as I’ve been wanting to check out FME for some time now. Free Home Use License of FME Desktop

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Cesium ion SketchUp extension for publishing models as 3D Tiles

If you want to bring custom 3D models into Cesium then you might be interested in a new plugin for exporting models into the 3D Tiles format. Publish 3D Tiles from SketchUp with the new Cesium ion Extension | cesium.comWe are happy to announce

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QGIS 3.8

I may not use ArcGIS Pro, but I do use QGIS. The latest 3.8 update is out now and brings a range of new features and changes. I’m quite interested in the hash-line symbols and the expression filter updates, as well as

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ArcGIS Pro 2.4

I’ll be honest, I don’t use ArcGIS Pro (yet — I’m considering a personal licence to check it out) but I’ve always been impressed by what people are creating using it. The 2.4 update brings loads of changes, too many

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New map of Greenland reveals fast-changing environment

Mapping the Arctic region is challenging due to the ever-changing coastline caused by glaciers and retreating ice sheets. Over the past 2 years Laura Gerrish has been working on collecting up-to-date data to produce this incredibly detailed map for the British Antarctic Survey. New

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Watercolour map

Wes Jones has produced an amazing watercolour map for the Esri basemap collection. What’s even more impressive about this is that, aside from the watercolour textures, the basemap is vector. He even took watercolour classes to be able to create this. That’s

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IFSAR-derived image of the Yukon River in Alaska

You may have seen Daniel Coe’s stunning LIDAR river visualisations before. If you haven’t, then you’re in for a treat! He regularly posts similar images so I recommend having a dig through his Twitter feed. Lovely stuff! #IFSAR-derived image of the

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Hurricane inundation zone map

This beautiful map by Fabien Lezeau shows the areas that would be affected by varying categories of hurricanes. The LIDAR-based relief adds an extra element of detail and context to the map. Created using QGIS and Blender. I added some relief to my Hurricane

Newsletter

Spatial Awareness #2

Read issue 2 of the Spatial Awareness newsletter, rounding up the latest in the spatial community.

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Women in Geospatial+

Not only an account to follow for interesting spatial content, their primary focus is as a professional network to promote gender equality in the spatial industry. Women in Geospatial+ (@geospatialwomen)

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Carl Churchill

I discovered Carl’s work on Twitter quite recently and immediately loved it. He’s prolific and has produced loads of beautiful maps. He’s also a student at Arizona State University. It’s criminal that he only has 33 followers on Twitter — I

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Netherlands building data in PostgreSQL and GeoPackage formats

Delft University of Technology has helped pull together GeoPackage and PostgreSQL downloads for 3D building data in the Netherlands. Building quality is LOD1, which are effectively extruded polygons. 3D BAG3D Basisregistratie Adressen en Gebouwen (BAG)

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First batch of 1m LIDAR data for England's full coverage

In December 2017 the Environment Agency announced their 3-year plan to deliver a 1m LIDAR dataset that covers the whole of England. Fast forward to today and they’ve released their first batch of data from the 17/18 winter flying season (they fly

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New Zealand releases 10s of thousands of old aerial photographs

The National Library and Alexander Turnbull Library in New Zealand have released nearly 50,000 old aerial photographs, free to use under a CC-BY licence. I’m yet to dig through them all (is that even possible?) but no doubt these will be of

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DCFemTech recognises Mapbox Map Data Engineer Anna Petrone

An insightful interview with Anna Petrone, highlighting why she’s interested in maps and her advice to people in influence for making the tech industry more inviting for women. DCFemTech recognizes Mapbox Map Data Engineer Anna PetroneDCFemTech is a coalition aimed at lowering the

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(Who will be) America's next big mapping company?

Paul Ramsey looks at the history of mapping companies in the US takes a stab at who might become the big thing. Spoiler: Could it be Amazon? Will be interesting to loop back to this one in a year or two. (Who will be)