I've complemented the NFL website on their play-by-play interactive graphic before.  Well, it's football season again, and until One HD starts broadcasting the games in Australia, I've been catching up on the NFL website.  I noticed another interactive map that they have that displays a team's schedule on a map.  Basically it is a flow map of home and away games.  It does leave something to be desired unfortunately.  I'd like to see labels of the teams without having to click on the clunky lines.  Either way it was a unique attempt at displaying the information.

This website was posted on Cartotalk and I thought it looked pretty good:  Cartography 2.0.  Seems to be a lot of valuable theoritical and some practical guides to cartography.

Kelso has posted a link to an interesting article.  The gist - "How Google’s open-ended maps are embroiling the company in some of the world’s touchiest geopolitical disputes."  Of course this isn't really anything new.  Maps created outside of the contested area are always controversial, e.g. National Geographic and the Persian Gulf.  What is particularly interesting in this case, is how technology is allowing the modern atlas to be in more than one place at once.  Google maintains different maps for different regions of the world, allowing a space where Iranians might see the Persian Gulf and Saudi Arabians might see Arabian Gulf.  Of course, there are always going to be layers of meanings and names for places from the local/individual to what the nation has "officially" decided.  In some ways, Google is trying to cater for that as well by placing photos from panaramio on google maps so you can "explore" the area.  The other interesting bit in the article is how Google is being held responsible for Crowdsourcing of geographic/historic data (accurate or otherwise).  I think when Neogeography and Crowdsourcing are spoken of, it is generally in this solve the world gleam sort of way (sorry not very eloquent this morning), but this article shines a light on its dark side.

 

Plus it quotes Goodchild, so how bad can the article be.

I saw this very very cool mashup from a post at cartotalk.  It shows all the trains movement in the London tube/subway/metro system on a google map.  It's based on data that comes direct from a government API.  It does beg the question - what would a terrorist do with such information?  Something tells me they wouldn't make a cool mashup, but hopefully terrorists don't know how to use AJAX.

Craig was nice enough to leave an actual legitamte comment in the sea of spam that is this blog's comment section.  He mentions the Neo4J spatial project.  I did come across it after I posted but I thought would mention here.  Not much information available, but still could be a really cool project.  There is a bit of source code on GitHub though.

 

Update:

Should have dug a little deeper before posting.  Here's a bit more information.  I think the discussion about the approaches to geometry storage is particularly interesting.  My intial thoughts on this was that each of the components could be related to one another.  Something like this:

 

 

 

But as they say, what are the impacts on performance and scalability.