october 2008 archives

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Who's my city? Fargo?

According to Richard Florida's latest book Who's Your City?, cartographers should seriously consider moving to Fargo, North Dakota. If you are a geoscientist, either Boulder/Denver, Colorado or Houston, Texas are your best options to further your career. Deciding where to live is the most important decision of your life. So, pack your bags and book a ticket to Fargo?

In the map The New Geography of Work, Richard Florida identifies occupations that have a high Location Quotient for cities across the US. The Location Quotient is a ratio quantifying how concentrated a particular industry is in a region as compared to the nation. Florida reasons that the higher the concentration of an industry in an area, the better the employment opportunities in that industry in that area. Unfortunately, the Location Quotient Calculator on the US Bureau of Labor Statistics website does not give you the Location Quotient for employment in Surveying and Mapping Services (NAICS 541370) at either the MSA-level (Fargo, ND-MN) or the state-level (North Dakota). The State of the North Dakota Workforce - 2007 (PDF) report from the North Dakota Department of Commerce does provide a Location Quotient for Cartographers and Photogrammetrists (SOC 17-1021) in North Dakota of 17.97. This means that Cartographers and Photogrammetrists are nearly 18 times more concentrated in North Dakota than average!

Most concentrations on the map make perfect sense at first glance. Of course there's a high concentration of entertainers in Los Angeles, lawyers in Washington, and musicians in Nashville. So what's the deal with cartographers in Fargo? In the New York Post, Florida gives a rather romantic reason for the high concentration of cartographers in the area: maps started in Fargo because it was the frontier trading town. Actually, this high concentration is not much of a surprise, if you simply know that Navteq has major production facilities in Fargo... For more maps, don't forget to check out the accompanying website.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

The Atlas of the Real World

The hardcover copy of The Atlas of the Real World: Mapping the Way We Live has just arrived by mail, even a week earlier than I had expected! I must admit, though, that I could hardly wait much longer to feel the paper sheets between my fingers and flip through the 366 cartograms. Oh, wait! Wasn't Webmapper all about online mapping? Don't worry: all maps are also available on the website Worldmapper: The world as you've never seen it before.

Danny Dorling and his team at the Social and Spatial Inequalities Research Group (SASI) have quite a track record in creating cartograms to represent social statistics. Already at the SoC Summer School in Cambridge back in 2005, he presented a first set of cartogram world maps using the new density-equalizing map projection by Michael Gastner and Mark Newman. This very map projection is now being used throughout the book. Eventually, the SASI research work has culminated in the Worldmapper website and the book publication of The Atlas of the Real World.

In between the Introduction that gives some background about the history, construction, and interpretation of cartograms and the Endmatter listing the data sources behind the maps, the 366 cartograms in the book are organised into 16 colour-coded chapters distributed across 6 parts:

The Resourceful World
The Trading World
The Economic World
The Social World
The Perilous World
The Environmental World

Although the Thumbnail Index also lists 366 cartograms, the Worldmapper website contains 582 cartograms in total and there even seem to be more to come, going by the 30 Map Categories that do have a hyperlink and the 2 more Map Categories (Language and Sport/Leisure) that don't. Would this mean, there may be a new edition of the print atlas in the future? Furthermore, you can browse through the maps by key word in the A-Z Map Index. If you are looking for a specific map, there is also a Search for a Map facility at the top right of each Web page.

The Map Categories on the website make much more sense than the chapters in the book. For example, the cartogram Right to vote makes perfect sense in the Map Category Action, but why did it end up in print in the chapter Land Area and Population? Another example is the cartogram Suicide in the Map Category Cause of Death. In the book, the cartogram Suicides appears in the chapter War and Crime! Well, the text on the website partially explains (?) this choice from a historical perspective, but it still seems odd:

Suicide (deaths due to self-inflicted injury) was often and in some places still is considered to be a sin or a crime. Now it usually recognised as being due to mental illness...

While there is a chapter Natural Resources and Energy and a chapter Pollution and Depletion, the former in the part The Resourceful World, the latter in the part The Environmental World, the cartogram Forest Loss is grouped in the chapter Natural Resources and Energy, not in Pollution and Depletion. All in all, the book chapters should have been given some further thought also to align with the website and take advantage from a consistent, cross-media approach.

Each of the 366 subjects in the book is presented on a dedicated page. Subject 032 in the book is Rail Travel, while subject 32 on the website is Mopeds and Motorcycles. Each page in the book has almost the same layout and contains the following, recurring items:

Textual

subject title
summary
description
quote

Graphical

cartogram
line graph or bar chart or pie chart

Tabular

ten highest-scoring territories
ten lowest-scoring territories

Each of the twelve regions in the world has its own colour to discern large-scale geographical patterns. These colours are also used in the graph on the same page. Within each region, each territory is depicted as a shade of the colour of the region it belongs to. Again, for some reason, there is no consistency between the book and the website, because the colours of the regions and territories differ. For example, Africa is depicted in shades of green in the book, but is depicted in shades of orange and red on the website.

All bar charts have the same order of bars, one for each region. This ensures consistency throughout the book to facilitate comparisons between subjects, but this makes it difficult to compare regions for one subject. It's easy to see which region is the highest-scoring or lowest-scoring, but which ones are number 5 and 6 requires quite some effort from the reader. The same goes for the pie charts. They also have the same order of wedges. The reason to facilitate comparisons between subjects is not valid here, because the wedges always have different angles and there is no consistent origin. Ordering the wedges from highest-scoring to lowest-scoring and starting at 12 o'clock would be a huge improvement.

On the website, all 582 subjects have their own dedicated web page. Since each cartogram shows the territories in different shapes, visitors can quickly link to a labelled territory map or population map for comparison. Besides viewing the cartogram, visitors can download the map in PDF vector format and high-resolution TIFF raster format. Furthermore, visitors can download the underlying data for use in Microsoft Excel and OpenOffice Calc. Despite the fact that this website and its contents are licensed under a Creative Commons license, it does not allow you to create any derivative works...

The table and chart for each subject are missing from the web pages, but they are included on the PDFs for each subject that can be downloaded from the website. Furthermore, each line (i.e. each territory) in the table on the PDF is nicely colour-coded by its respective region.

Really, I hope my remarks are taken as a constructive critique. Both the book and the website are a cartographic dream come true. Who would ever have thought before we now have all this world-wide data available and can create these exciting cartograms? Seeing these cartograms before you, you really become interested in the reasons why one country ranks higher or lower than another. There's a whole world to explore: that's what cartography is really all about. Thank you SASI team!

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Maps in advertising

Today is the Amsterdam Marathon. In the weeks before, there were advertising posters displayed throughout the city bearing the event logo: an orange running shoe with the grooves of the sole outlining the map of the Amsterdam city centre. The logo also features on the official certificates that participants receive upon completion of the marathon.

Also, the current advertising campaign of the Amsterdam public transport company GVB features a map. It has taken some of the iconic elements of the topological network map, first introduced by Harry Beck when designing the London Underground map. A straight line with empty circles — the canonical symbol for interchange — emphasises the campaign's motto: GVB connects all of Amsterdam with all of Amsterdam.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Navteq loses Google Maps

Since a few weeks ago, the mapping website Google Maps no longer uses Navteq map data alongside Tele Atlas map data. Until then, Google featured map data from both providers, presumably due to limitations in the Navteq license: the Google Maps mapping website used map data from Navteq, whereas the Google Maps API and Google Maps Mobile used map data from Tele Atlas.

Both Mike Blumenthal and the Map Room announced that Google exclusively uses Tele Atlas data, but this is a rather North-American bias. Google still uses map data from other providers as well, such as AND and Europa Technologies (small-scale world maps), Zenrin (Japan), PSMA (Australia), and MapABC (China). Nevertheless, it leaves us with the question Why?. Here are some hypotheses:

The move ensures a consistent, cross-platform user experience;
Tele Atlas' map quality is superior;
Nokia/Navteq is a competitor;
It is a clause in the Google-Tele Atlas contract;

Whether you are on the Google Maps website, you access Google Maps Mobile on your mobile phone, or you visit any mapping mashup based on the Google Maps API, the maps now look all the same for the same areas. I wonder if users have actually realised this difference before. Hence, this consistent, cross-platform user experience would rather be a by-product than a conscious decision. There are some further advantages, though: Google no longer has to process two different maps, nor does Google have to deploy two flavours of mapping servers.

When Google signed a new contract with Tele Atlas in June this year, John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Google Maps stated that Tele Atlas' map quality and [...] were the key drivers for our decision. Nevertheless, not only The Earth Is Square and The Map Room have raised concerns regarding Tele Atlas' map quality, particularly in North America. Google is not the first to be scrutinised. This Achilles heel of Tele Atlas has been exposed before, when TomTom launched a Mapquest-branded sat-nav in the US:

Engadget: The $699 Mapquest device will be identical to the 300 — except that it'll always choose the most convoluted, least efficient route to your destination.

Gizmodo: the Gadget Guide: Now instead of getting the wrong directions beforehand, I can get completely lost on the go!

GPS Magazine: Time and time again I find major roadways that are inaccurate or missing altogether from the Tele Atlas map database.

One could put these issues down as growing pains of Tele Atlas when it made an entrance into the US market by acquiring Etak (2000) and GDT (2004). Historically, GDT catered to the appetite of the traditional GIS user, whereas Navteq has always pursued the vehicle-navigation market, winning them almost 100 percent of the US automotive navigation systems market. So, although it's a nice marketing quote from Hanke, I have my doubts about the hypothesis that Google Map choose Tele Atlas over Navteq because of its superior map quality.

In the recent Directions Magazine Podcast, the editors suggested that Google Maps may have dropped Navteq, because Google and Nokia are becoming competitors in the mobile phone market. This market is heating up quite a bit indeed. Nokia has started promoting its Nokia Maps application with The Mapsters and Google has just introduced Google Maps Mobile for Android. All in all, this seems like a pretty good reason for Google to drop Navteq. It's always a bad situation when your competitor controls your raw materials.

Finally, it may well have been a clause in the new contract with Tele Atlas that Google should drop Navteq as soon as it could terminate its commitments to Navteq. Unfortunately, we can only guess at this one. Nevertheless, this move has certainly helped Tele Atlas to gain market position in the US online mapping arena that historically has been dominated by Navteq with clients like MapQuest, Live Search Maps and Yahoo Maps.

Thursday, October 09, 2008

From mapping website to satnav

After MapQuest, Google Maps and Yahoo Maps, Live Search Maps is the next mapping website in the North-American market to offer visitors the option to search and send destinations to a satnav device, a Garmin satnav device in particular. You can either hook up your satnav device to your PC using the Garmin Communicator browser plugin, or you can send it wirelessly to an MSN Direct-compatible Garmin satnav device.

Last year, when TomTom revealed its intentions to buy Tele Atlas and Nokia acquired Navteq, there were quite some rumours that Microsoft would buy Garmin. I am just wondering whether this new feature is simply a sign of the times or actually a next step of Garmin and Microsoft moving closer together.