Mapping Hacks: Tips & Tools for Electronic Cartography

by Schuyler Erle, Rich Gibson, Jo Walsh, Simon St. Laurent (Editor)

Overview

Since the dawn of creation, man has designed maps to help identify the space that we occupy. From Lewis and Clark's pencil-sketched maps of mountain trails to Jacques Cousteau's sophisticated charts of the ocean floor, creating maps of the utmost precision has been a constant pursuit. So why should things change now? Well, they shouldn't. The reality is that map creation, or "cartography," has only improved in its ease-of-use over time. In fact, with the recent explosion of inexpensive computing and the growing availability of public mapping data, mapmaking today extends all the way to the ordinary PC user. Mapping Hacks, the latest page-turner from O'Reilly Press, tackles this notion head on. It's a collection of one hundred simple--and mostly free--techniques available to developers and power users who want draw digital maps or otherwise visualize geographic data. Authors Schuyler Erle, Rich Gibson, and Jo Walsh do more than just illuminate the basic concepts of location and cartography, they walk you through the process one step at a time. Mapping Hacks shows you where to find the best sources of geographic data, and then how to integrate that data into your own map. But that's just an appetizer. This comprehensive resource also shows you how to interpret and manipulate unwieldy cartography data, as well as how to incorporate personal photo galleries into your maps. It even provides practical uses for GPS (Global Positioning System) devices--those touch-of-a-button street maps integrated into cars and mobile phones. Just imagine: If Captain Kidd had this technology, we'd all know where to find his buried treasure! With all of these industrial-strength tips and tools, Mapping Hacks effectively takes the sting out of the digital mapmaking and navigational process. Now you can create your own maps for business, pleasure, or entertainment--without ever having to sharpen a single pencil.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780596007034
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	06/28/2005
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	564
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.11(d)

About the Author

Schuyler Erle was born in a small paper bag in Philadelphia, and then again five days later in Baltimore. As a youth, he had to get up every morning two hours before he went to bed in order to walk fifteen miles uphill to school, and then another seventeen miles uphill to get home in the evening. After many years of some nonsense involving Karnaugh maps, a botched attempt at a Red Cross sailing certificate, and the early works of Chomsky, Schuyler was finally and at long last sent packing with something his mentors found at the bottom of a Cracker Jack box. Later, after a tragic accident that left him nearly completely lacking in common sense, he served brief stints on Phobos and Ganymede with the Space Patrol, before returning to study n-dimensional unicycle frisbee golf at a yak herding collective in Miami. Somewhere along the line he made the grave error of attempting to implement a full-scale multi-user web application using a combination of tcsh, awk, and sed, which lead him straight into the arms of O'Reilly & Associates, first as a reader, and then as an author and humble developer. Four years & fifty thousand miles later, we present him in his full and unabridged form, where he hacks Perl behind the scenes at the O'Reilly Network, does on-site technical support for ORA's fine conferences team, is involved in a variety of database and production development projects across the company, and still manages to write and give conference talks for ORA from time to time.

Rich Gibson is a Perl/Database programmer in Santa Rosa. He has worked professionally with computers since 1982 when he created Public Utility Rate Case Models in SuperCalc on an Osborne II. His current fascination is creating tools to aid in the acquisition, management, and presentation of information with a geographic component. He is currently converting an old golf cart into a mobile geo annotation platform.Rich is active with the NoCat Community Network in Sebastopol, California, and is the primary developer of NoCat Maps (http: //maps.nocat.net/).

Jo Walsh is a freelance hacker and software artist who started out building web systems for the Guardian, the ICA and state51 in London. She now works with the semantic web, spatial annotation and bots.

Table of Contents

Copyright; Dedication; Foreword; Credits; About the Authors; Contributors; Acknowledgments; Preface; Why Mapping Hacks?; Maps Tell Stories; Location: It's Everywhere; Never Be Lost Again (Even if You'd Rather Be); Towards a Semantic (Geo)web; Locative Media as a Two-Way Street; Brother, Can You Spare a Polygon Layer?; A Geoscope in Every Home; The Adventure Continues . . .; How to Use This Book; How This Book Is Organized; Conventions Used in This Book; Using Code Examples; How to Contact Us; Got a Hack?; Chapter 1: Mapping Your Life; 1.1 Hacks 1-13; 1 Put a Map on It: Mapping Arbitrary Locations with Online Services; 2 Route Planning Online; 3 Map the Places You've Visited; 4 Find Your House on an Aerial Photograph; 5 The Road Less Traveled by in MapQuest; 6 Make Route Maps Easier to Read; 7 Will the Kids Barf?; 8 Publish Maps of Your Photos on the Web; 9 Track the Friendly Skies with Sherlock; 10 Georeference Digital Photos; 11 How Far? How Fast? Geo-Enabling Your Spreadsheet; 12 Create a Distance Grid in Excel; 13 Add Maps to Excel Spreadsheets with MapPoint; Chapter 2: Mapping Your Neighborhood; 2.1 Hacks 14-21; 14 Make Free Maps of the United States Online; 15 Zoom Right In on Your Neighborhood; 16 Who Are the Neighbors Voting For?; 17 Map Nearby Wi-Fi Hotspots; 18 Why You Can't Watch Broadcast TV; 19 Analyze Elevation Profiles for Wireless Community Networks; 20 Make 3-D Raytraced Terrain Models; 21 Map Health Code Violations with RDFMapper; Chapter 3: Mapping Your World; 3.1 Hacks 22-34; 22 Digging to China; 23 Explore David Rumsey's Historical Maps; 24 Explore a 3-D Model of the Entire World; 25 Work with Multiple Lat/Long Formats; 26 Work with Different Coordinate Systems; 27 Calculate the Distance Between Points on the Earth's Surface; 28 Experiment with Different Cartographic Projections; 29 Plot Arbitrary Points on a World Map; 30 Plot a Great Circle on a Flat Map; 31 Plot Dymaxion Maps in Perl; 32 Hack on Base Maps in Your Favorite Image Editor; 33 Georeference an Arbitrary Tourist Map; 34 Map Other Planets; Chapter 4: Mapping (on) the Web; 4.1 Hacks 35-46; 35 Search Local, Find Global; 36 Shorten Online Map URLs; 37 Tweak the Look and Feel of Web Maps; 38 Add Location to Weblogs and RSS Feeds; 39 View Your Photo Thumbnails on a Flash Map; 40 Plot Points on a Spinning Globe Applet; 41 Plot Points on an Interactive Map Using DHTML; 42 Map Your Tracklogs on the Web; 43 Map Earthquakes in (Nearly) Real Time; 44 Plot Statistics Against Shapes; 45 Extract a Spatial Model from Wikipedia; 46 Map Global Weather Conditions; Chapter 5: Mapping with Gadgets; 5.1 Hacks 47-63; 5.2 How GPS Works; 47 Get Maps on Your Mobile Phone; 48 Accessorize Your GPS; 49 Get Your Tracklogs in Windows or Linux; 50 The Serial Port to USB Conundrum; 51 Speak in Geotongues: GPSBabel to the Rescue; 52 Show Your Waypoints on Aerial Photos with Terrabrowser; 53 Visualize Your Tracks in Three Dimensions; 54 Create Your Own Maps for a Garmin GPS; 55 Use Your Track Memory as a GPS Base Map; 56 Animate Your Tracklogs; 57 Connect to Your GPS from Multiple Applications; 58 Don't Lose Your Tracklogs!; 59 Geocode Your Voice Recordings and Other Media; 60 Improve the Accuracy of Your GPS with Differential GPS; 61 Build a Map of Local GSM Cells; 62 Build a Car Computer; 63 Build Your Own Car Navigation System with GpsDrive; Chapter 6: Mapping on Your Desktop; 6.1 Hacks 64-77; 64 Mapping Local Areas of Interest with Quantum GIS; 65 Extract Data from Maps with Manifold; 66 Java-Based Desktop Mapping with Openmap; 67 Seamless Data Download from the USGS; 68 Convert Geospatial Data Between Different Formats; 69 Find Your Way Around GRASS; 70 Import Your GPS Waypoints and Tracklogs into GRASS; 71 Turn Your Tracklogs into ESRI Shapefiles; 72 Add Relief to Your Topographic Maps; 73 Make Your Own Contour Maps; 74 Plot Wireless Network Viewsheds with GRASS; 75 Share Your GRASS Maps with the World; 76 Explore the Effects of Global Warming; 6.15 Conclusion; 77 Become a GRASS Ninja; Chapter 7: Names and Places; 7.1 Hacks 78-86; 78 What to Do if Your Government Is Hoarding Geographic Data; 79 Geocode a U.S. Street Address; 80 Automatically Geocode U.S. Addresses; 81 Clean Up U.S. Addresses; 82 Find Nearby Things Using U.S. ZIP Codes; 83 Map Numerical Data the Easy Way; 84 Build a Free World Gazetteer; 85 Geocode U.S. Locations with the GNIS; 86 Track a Package Across the U.S.; Chapter 8: Building the Geospatial Web; 8.1 Hacks 87-92; 87 Build a Spatially Indexed Data Store; 88 Load Your Waypoints into a Spatial Database; 89 Publish Your Geodata to the Web with GeoServer; 90 Crawl the Geospatial Web with RedSpider; 91 Build Interactive Web-Based Map Applications; 92 Map Wardriving (and other!) Data with MapServer; Chapter 9: Mapping with Other People; 9.1 Hacks 93-100; 93 Node Runner; 94 Geo-Warchalking with 2-D Barcodes; 95 Model Interactive Spaces; 96 Share Geo-Photos on the Web; 97 Set Up an OpenGuide for Your Hometown; 98 Give Your Great-Great-Grandfather a GPS; 99 Map Your Friend-of-a-Friend Network; 100 Map Imaginary Places; Colophon;