The LA Times had an interesting map on measles vaccination rates at child-care centers in the Los Angeles area. You can see some scary clusters … that’s you Santa Monica! Click the map to read the article.
Check out this historical atlas of the California State Highway System. The atlas has a reversed chronological assembly of official California highway maps from 1990 back to 1918. The maps are bound together with a custom cover and include regional enlargements, illustrations, descriptive text, route descriptions, and construction and funding status. Download the maps in their high resolution glory!
Check this map out showing how much snow it takes to cancel school by state. Click it to read the article about how it was created.
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Google has announced that they are ending support for Google Maps Engine (GME). If you are using GME to store your vector and raster data in the cloud, be aware that your GME data will be removed in a year on January 29, 2016.
So where can you migrate your data now? Safe Software has written an article listing some options that you have. Of course if you use their FME product, it’s just a one-step process! However, besides the sales pitch, they do present some options that you have to migrate your data to.
I personally have used ArcGIS Online and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) to store spatial data. With ArcGIS Online you have to buy a plan first, then you will consume credits when you store your data there. With Amazon RDS you can use SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, or the new Amazon Aurora with costs for the instance (server) size/database type, consumed storage, and traffic. Keep in mind that ArcGIS Online has tools built-in to analyze and display spatial data as well as being integrated with their ArcGIS software products. Amazon RDS is just a storage solution, so you will need to come up with other options for analyzing and map display of your spatial data in the cloud, like using ArcGIS software or something else.
Into a little history in LA County? I found this interesting map showing historic sites, old highways, battle fields, indian villages, gold mines, camps, towns, and other historical places of interest in old Los Angeles County. The map was created by George W. Kirkman and titled “The Kirkman-Harriman Pictorial and Historical Map of Los Angeles County 1860-1937”. Check it out on the LA Public Library website!
If you have apps using Silverlight, this is the year to plan and move them to HTML5. ESRI plans on deprecating ArcGIS APIs and Viewers for Silverlight, and Google plans to remove support for NPAPI (and therefore Silverlight) in Chrome. Note that IE and Firefox will still support Silverlight for some time.
If you have apps built on Geocortex technology, it is time for you to move to HTML5 for sure. Watch this video from a past webinar to help get your applications where they need to be for the transition.
Check out this interactive map comparing the annual average pay from 2004 and 2013. One-third of all US counties have seen their pay decline!
Planning on traveling during the holidays? Flying? Stay on top of the travel misery and view Flight Aware’s Misery Map. The map gives you an interactive look at travel across the country and overlays weather radar showing the obvious connection between bad weather and bad travel. Hover over an airport and view the connections and the misery. There is also a timelapse button to view the weather, and misery, in action!
Looking for aggregate census data and boundary files? Check out the National Historical Geographic Information System. They include census information from 1790 to the present.
Through the NHGIS Data Finder, users may:
All free of charge!
They have currently released:
NHGIS is also preparing the 2013 ACS 5-year Summary Files and 2013 GIS boundary files for release by early 2015.
After 25 years, the Census TIGER data is still in demand. Even the USGS plans on using it as the primary source of road mapping data for its National Map Viewer and Topo digital mapping applications.
