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February 21, 2012
Data Blog - Atlas Van Lines Migration Data 2002-2011
Posted by Robert Hildebrand
Tags: Data Blog, Free Data, Migration, Population
Every year, Atlas Van Lines compiles their shipping data focusing on the point of departures and the destinations their trucks travel. Their 2011 Migration Patterns study offers insight on how people are moving around the United States and parts of Canada. This year, it has shown that there was a general increase in total moves as compared with last year. The three classifications a state can have are Inbound, Outbound, and Balanced. Inbound states are those which the number of inbound shipments exceeds the state’s threshold (determined by the total number of shipments for that state multiplied by 55%) and similarly for Outbound states, the number of outbound shipments would need to exceed the state’s threshold value. Take note however, that this is data from only one moving company, it does not factor in self-movers or other shipping companies.
Atlas Van Lines: Migration Data 2002-2011
Here is a brief summary of noticeable trends from Atlas Van Lines:
Southwestern and Mid-Atlantic coastal states were popular destinations in 2011. The Midwest continues to lose residents, but Michigan became a balanced state after six consecutive years of steady outbound moves. For the sixth year in a row, Washington, D.C. had the highest percentage of inbound moves, while Ohio came out the clear leader in the highest percentage of outbound moves.
Unable to find a raw data source for their stats, I created a spatial version of the information in their PDF by joining it with Natural Earth 10m Administrative data. WeoGeo does not claim ownership of this data; we are simply making it available in a different format other than PDF.
February 15, 2012
WhereCampTB
Posted by Dan Dye
Tags: WhereCamp, WeoGeo, TileMill
No, @ManoMarks, “WhereCampTB” is not about mapping tuberculosis but rather the Other Bay Area’s first WhereCamp, which was held last weekend. The event kicked off on Friday night with IGNITE Spatial at Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s theater.
The Platinum sponsor, United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation, gave the first IGNITE Presentation and also encouraged campers to attend the GEOINT symposium in Orlando in 2012 (and Tampa in 2013).
My talk on smart pre-rendering and caching of mapping tiles was up next. My slides are on slideshare and embedded below (as is a video of my presentation).
Other highlights:
- Eric Wolf on authoritative vs volunteered geospatial data. Eric and our local Barbara Poore have published on and are currently researching this subject.
- Kevin Stofan demonstrated spatial analysis with tools like GeoDa (which I am big fan of) and Joella Schultz demonstrated watershed management. Florida’s intense rainfall and flat terrain make the challenges she described all too familiar.
- Spatial Networks organized the event and their developers and executives were out in force: Patrick Wilson, Coleman McCormick, Anthony Quartararo, and Zac McCormick presented on Maps 101, Open Street Map, graffiti mapping, and nautical charting respectively. All great talks.
- Ian Velleda from Development Seed demonstrated cartography in TileMill and MapBox. He showed some styling problems and how those are resolved in the OSM-bright and other templates. TileMill and Mapnik were recurring themes at both this conference and others that I’ve recently attended.
Drawings were then held for Gold Sponsor O’Reilly’s upcoming Where Conference and the Ignitees then adjourned to a restaurant in downtown St. Petersburg.
The unconference on Saturday was held in St. Petersburg College’s Collaborative Labs and I have never seen a better venue for such an event. My favorite session was on Metadata creation/management/dissemination. WhereCampers from industry, local governments, and academia balanced the discussion between pragmatism and theory. Unfortunately, in the one hour that we spent, we were not able to solve the world’s metadata management problems.
Another highlight for me was the map tiling session. WeoGeo, Spatial Networks, and Development Seed hatched a scheme to take over the world: All your maps are belong to us!
I’ve attended a couple of WhereCamps in the San Francisco Bay area, so I feel I can fairly judge Tampa Bay’s first event. The area is not a Geo-Mecca like San Francisco, Boston, Portland, or Denver but there are enthusiastic geo-professionals who are eager to share and learn. I’m thankful to Spatial Networks for organizing and to the sponsors for giving us all the opportunity to do so.
February 14, 2012
Data Blog - Blue Marble Next Generation
Posted by James Fee
Tags: Data Blog, Raster, Blue Marble, Satellite, Imagery, Free
The Blue Marble could be one of the most iconic images from our generation. Originally taken from Apollo 17, this picture was probably the first image that showed a fully illuminated Earth and looked like a glass marble (thus the name, “Blue Marble”). NASA has since applied the name to a series of satellite-capture imagery first released in 2002. This 1km/pixel image was the most detailed imagery available for free and was widely used as background imagery by thousands of users.
In 2005, NASA updated the Blue Marble with a release called Blue Marble Next Generation which offered double the spatial resolution of the original images and looks even better due to new techniques developed to color balance the the image without losing detail. These new images are available for free on NASA’s website in JPG or PNG format without any georeferencing. That means users who want to use the Blue Marble Next Generation images will have to process them further. Because of this, we at WeoGeo decided to upload all the tiles at their highest resolution and mosaic them together in one large image. This almost 11GB image is available for free on WeoGeo Market.
We hope you find this of great value and it makes it much easier to use public domain satellite imagery in all your projects. If you’ve got other datasets you wish to see on the WeoGeo Market, please let us know. We’d love to add them to our library.
February 10, 2012
Feature Blog - New WeoGeo Release
Posted by James Fee
Tags: Feature, Market, Order, Library, Customize
We continue to introduce new features to WeoGeo Market and Library and the latest is one that I’m very excited about. With the latest release of WeoGeo, you can now have your order placed directly into your own library. This gives you the option of having the data available to you whenever you need it, because it will be accessible inside your own library for as long as you wish. Plus, since a WeoGeo Library starts at free, you can store data (up to 100mb) without any additional cost.
When placing an order for a dataset, you’ll notice on the “Order Dataset” dialog that there is a new option to “Also place a copy in my Library”.
When you click on the “Choose a Library” button, you’ll get a drop-down list where you can pick any library you own to store a copy of the order.
In this case, I’ve chosen my personal WeoGeo Library named “James Fee”. When I accept the license agreement and click order now, I’ll still receive an email telling me my dataset is ready to download, but it will also be immediately placed in my private Library. If I go ahead and log in to my own Library, I can see that the Maricopa County TIGER dataset I order is now available.
If I look at those dataset details, I’m still able to customize and download that order again. For example, while I currently have all of Maricopa County in my Library, I may only need Tempe, AZ. I can further order and deliver customized orders of this original data as a download from my Library, not the WeoGeo Market. Even if you ordered a dataset that had a price in WeoGeo Market, you can freely customize that dataset in your own library!
One thing to keep in mind, Library transfer is not available for customized orders. Thus I can’t save the Tempe order to my library as a new dataset. But WeoGeo keeps track of all your past orders, so you can easily replicate an order you made months or even years ago. And remember, orders inside your own Library are free!
Storing your data offsite in a hosted content management system is a no brainer. You’ll always have your data available and ready to use. I think this is a killer new feature for WeoGeo. It even works out of private Markets such as Pitney Bowes’ Geosk. That means you can order data from Pitney Bowes and store it in your free WeoGeo Library. Brilliant!
February 01, 2012
Data Blog - Worldwide Boundary Products
Posted by Robert Hildebrand
Tags: Data Blog, Free Data, Natural Earth, TIGER, Neighborhoods, Boundary Lines
Getting data from WeoGeo Market is not a difficult task, however, sometimes it can be tedious if you’re needing a bunch of different data files and they are all from separate listings. A request must be submitted for each of the listings that are desired. We noticed that the listings that have been downloaded most frequently are typically related to administrative boundary data. There is plenty of this sort of data available on Market, but it is spread around amongst different listings. To make life easier, over 12 types of boundary data have been consolidated into one listing. This means that now it is possible to extract, reproject, and request file format changes for multiple boundary data sources all in one job.
The map below is composed solely from Natural Earth data and is provided for reference only. More data is available than what is displayed on this map.
The complete list of boundary products available from this listing currently are:
- TIGER/Line State Boundaries
- TIGER/Line County Boundaries
- TIGER/Line Metropolitan Divisions
- TIGER/Line 5 Digit ZIP Code Boundaries
- TIGER/Line Census Tracts
- TIGER/Line Census Block Groups
- Natural Earth 10m Admin Countries/Sovereignties
- Natural Earth 10m Admin Boundary Lines & Scale Ranks
- Natural Earth 10m Admin Disputed Areas
- Natural Earth 10m Admin States & Provinces
- Natural Earth 10m Urban Areas
- SimpleGeo Neighborhoods (2011.08.17)
- Zillow Neighborhood Boundaries (US)
- SimpleGeo Neighborhoods: Asia
- SimpleGeo Neighborhoods: Australia
- SimpleGeo Neighborhoods: Canada
- SimpleGeo Neighborhoods: Europe
We hope to continually evolve our Boundary Products listing and encourage anyone to contact us with any suggestions to boundary data that is desired.