may 2006 archives

Monday, May 22, 2006

Mobility atlas

Last week, the online Mobility Atlas of the Netherlands was launched, a joint initiative of the Netherlands Institute for Spatial Research (RPB) together with the Transport Research Centre (AVV). Previously, the atlas was only published on paper, but it is now a fully interactive atlas based on SVG.

It presents up-to-date information on traffic and transport from a geographic perspective in the context of spatial and economic developments. All information is mapped to highlight spatial patterns. However, the accompanying texts are brief and descriptive without providing explanations for the developments.

The overall structure and the maps are very similar to the Geographic Monitor, another online atlas published by the RPB that gives insight into the spatial dynamics of the Netherlands and its international context. Both atlases suffer from the reduced size of the static maps, thus rendering the map legends illegible! There's a button to enlarge the map, that triggers a pop-up window that contains the map at the actual size. Another issue is the lack of consistency. There is no uniform capitalisation of map titles and on some maps the legend has the caption legend, while on other maps this caption is omitted. Also, legend classes sometimes use the wrong graphic variable (e.g. hue instead of value) and class boundaries occasionally seem rather artificial.

The maps in SVG were created using MapViewSVG, an extension for ESRI ArcGIS. Although the vendor website claims that all functionality of MapViewSVG is supported natively in Firefox 1.5, the Mobility Atlas website recommends Internet Explorer and warns its users that support in Firefox is not optimal: maps load slowly and most functions don't work properly.

The interactive aspect of most maps is restricted to navigation, showing/hiding layers, and printing, e.g. the map Traffic accidents per inhabitant per municipality 2003. A pulldown menu enables users to zoom to a particular province. Users can toggle the visibility of layers using the checkboxes in the legend and navigation buttons to the right of the maps facilitate fine-grained zooming and panning. There is no functionality to obtain the name of the municipality or the actual number of traffic accidents and the number of traffic accidents per inhabitant. Another map an information button. Hovering the cursor over objects on the map, a descriptive label provides further information on the object. Actually, it gives the name of the province, or the abbreviation of the province name when hovering over a road, or some clueless number when hovering over a built-up area. Also, note the highlighting when hovering the mouse pointer across objects on the map. Nevertheless, legend classes such as Ris01-03_Aweg-Bubek are not helpful to anyone but to a small circle of GIS operators, I'm afraid. All in all, there's a lot the RPB can learn from the National Atlas of Public Health, but I cannot but applaud their brave decision to use SVG!

By the way, how about Gowrings Mobility UK Road Atlas? It puts mobility in a new perspective. The road atlas covers all of the UK and incorporates useful information such as parking for Blue Badge holders, accessible car parks and petrol stations, tourist information, Shopmobility locations, accessible beaches, toilets and a comprehensive accessible accommodation guide.

Monday, May 08, 2006

UK local election maps

Whereas last week's local election results led Blair to reshuffle his ministers, online media have hardly shown anything revolutionary when it comes to election maps. Admittedly, from a journalist's point-of-view it makes sense to geographically focus on the 32 London boroughs as a way to highlight Labour's struggle, the accompanying map in the Financial Times failed to support this story. Visitors can only obtain further information about eight of the 32 boroughs. The map only serves as a image map only to access further textual information, e.g. the number of councillors for each party. A message informs visitors Flash Player 6 or higher is required. Don't really see a reason why a simple PNG or GIF with a client-side image map wouldn't be able to provide the same level of information and interaction. No need for additional plug-ins either.

The Guardian Unlimited and the Times Online websites both re-use the maps that also appeared in print. The map on the Times Online website is a JPEG graphic of England with insets for London and the North West. Numbers in the councils refer to their names in the list of council names above the map. The dots following the names show visitors at once in which councils control has changed In the online version, there's not a real need for the list of council names as they may appear when hovering the mouse over the area using an image map. The councils where control has changed may then be highlighted by emphasising the council boundaries, e.g. by choosing a fatter line style. Finally, it's difficult to distinguish between the colours for the classes No overall control and No results by 6pm on Friday. Oh, by the way, stop using JPEG for maps!

Visitors of the Guardian Unlimited can download various PDF maps, allowing them to zoom in closer and pan around the map. The maps sourced from the Conservative party show the British councils. Unfortunately, the lettering on the map doesn't scale well, so the council names become illegible when zooming in. The maps sourced from the Guardian itself cover just London. The London boroughs facing elections on May 4 combines the map of the London boroughs with Isotype-style graphics indicating the number of seats for each party. Unfortunately, the number of seats is ordered according to the size of the party. Maintaining a fixed order across all boroughs would have been easier to grasp. This also makes comparison between boroughs much easier. To further facilitate comparison, boroughs should have been placed not in alphabetical order, but ordered by the number of seats held by Labour. Funnily enough, the City of London doesn't actually show at all on the map. Nevertheless, I like this one best.

The BBC website features a very fancy Flash-based map. The smooth, animated zooming and panning doesn't really add anything to the experience: you only have to wait longer before you can click on a particular council to view the election results presented in a table. I quite like how you can click on the Greater London area and the animation then gently zooms and the council boundaries only appear when fully zoomed in. The sliders along the edges of the map in order to pan around I find a bit difficult to operate.

Friday, May 05, 2006

The Netherlands flooded by Ask

In their race to become THE online mapping portal, search engines have been adding various map styles to the default street map, e.g. (vertical/oblique/street-level) aerial and satellite imagery. Ask.com recently added a physical map of the world. The map shows the variations in elevation of the Earth's surface, both on land and underwater!

With the beautiful weather outside today, it's very tempting to go for a swim here at the beach in Utrecht! I guess their cartographers forgot to add an extra hypsometric level: land below sea level. Remember when Google swapped the names of Belgium and the Netherlands around?