may 2007 archives

Friday, May 25, 2007

Putting cartography back into online mapping

The launch of the new mapping on the Yahoo Local website was not only marked by changing the map engine from deCarta to a home-grown system, but also by a redesign of the maps. For this, Yahoo teamed up with the people of Cartifact. For me, Cartifact has successfully bridged the gap between cartography and web mapping.

Web cartography has always been confined to interactive mapping applications serving only a small audience. These apps were either just world maps or covered only a small area, with a few levels of details. Instead of background maps, the applications were thematic maps, highlighting specific topics. Good cartographic design requires quite some manual work and is therefore costly. Cartographic firms in this field are for example the Swiss company Intermaps or the Amsterdam-based CartoStudio. The new look and feel of the maps on Yahoo Local shows that cartographic design can be automated to a large extent using a map engine, making it a viable option for high-volume mapping websites.

Let's focus on two areas where Yahoo Local stands out from other mapping websites: neighbourhood and terrain representation. While 2.5D building outlines on Google Maps was heralded as the new urban cartography online, the representation of neighbourhood delineations on Yahoo Local seems to reinforce this trend. Also Google Maps and Ask.com allow visitors to do a geographic search by supplying the name of a neighbourhood and show this on the map. Ask.com goes as far as to draw a red line on the map to show the delineations of the neighbourhood. On Yahoo Local, these delineations are represented in a far more subtle way: different neighbourhoods have different background colours. Would they all be using the Urbanware: Neighborhoods data set from Urban Mapping, as suggested by Brady on O'Reilly Radar?

Remember the Neighborhood Project? They create a map of city neighborhoods based on the collective opinions of internet users. The address and neighborhood data are collected from housing posts on craigslist, and from people filling out a form on the website. Now that would be a quick way to obtain neighbourhood data from all over the world. The New Popular Edition Maps website does this for UK postcodes, creating a public alternative for OS Codepoint.

Representing terrain on mapping websites is actually not so new. Already last year, Ask.com introduced the physical map as an addition to the common map and aerial/satellite map styles. In the new look and feel of the maps on Yahoo Local, the terrain height has been incorporated into the default map style. It is a backdrop for the road network.Have a look at the Swiss Alps for example.

Cartifact has achieved this look and feel by merging raster data (terrain height) and vector data (road network). They successfully adjusted the cartographic principles we all know from using paper maps to create a clear and crisp cartographic design required for publishing maps online. Multimap takes a different approach to show visitors maps with a familiar look and feel. They simply publish raster maps online that were intended for print publication. For example, visitors can now switch between the TeleAtlas maps and the OS 1:50,000 topographic maps or A-to-Z town maps. Unfortunately, the lettering, grid lines and transitions between colours on the map now look rather jagged and fuzzy, since these raster maps had to be reprojected from the British National Grid to the Mercator projection that is now used throughout the Multimap.com website. This explains why the OS maps were not included at the relaunch.

Going by the one-upping Cold War mentality of web 2.0-style online mapping thus far, let's hope this map redesign on the Yahoo Local website is the renaissance of cartography, suited to the needs of a mature, online audience, while accommodating the constraints of computer screens and online publishing.  permanent link for this entry

Saturday, May 19, 2007

Farewell FreeHand

When I read the subject line of the email earlier this week, it was a blow to the face: Adobe abandons FreeHand. Was it nostalgia? Was it defiance? Was it a sense of loss? Really, when I started at uni, I thought WordPerfect 5.1 and FreeHand 3.11 were the only programmes I ever needed to learn. WordPerfect — I just loved the Reveal Codes feature — would be the tool for word processing and FreeHand would be the tool of the trade of the digital cartographer that I was going to become after graduation. How things have changed!

During the first years at uni, the papers I submitted included at least one map created in FreeHand. They almost became my trademark. Since I already knew early on, that I wanted to do a major in cartography, I needed to learn FreeHand quickly. Instead of copying maps from other books, I drew my own, molding them to the topic at hand. This ability got me a student job at the Cartographic Lab in the Geography Department and later an internship at the Dutch national newspaper Trouw. FreeHand changed its first name from Aldus to Macromedia and aged over time: from version 3.11 to 5.5 to 7, 8, 10 and MX.

Okay, I abandoned FreeHand as well. Although it was a great tool to make maps, it didn't help me much in creating online maps. Instead, I learned to work with many GIS programmes, HTML authoring tools and web servers. Sometimes however, I returned to my good old fellow. Avenza's MAPublisher was a useful add-on to make FreeHand work for me in the digital era of GIS. But then Avenza stopped support for FreeHand in its MAPublisher product. Macromedia was bought by Adobe.

Rumours spread among my fellow cartographers of FreeHand's demise. Some of them hesitantly started migrating to Illustrator to be prepared in case the Sword of Damocles suspended over FreeHand were ever to drop. In the UK, the Society of Cartographers had even scheduled a workshop to facilitate the migration from FreeHand to Illustrator. Mere rumours... Until that email this week: the sword had dropped. Farewell FreeHand.  permanent link for this entry