Custom Mapping with TileMill

by KUMIKO YAMAZAKI on August 26, 2010 • cartography custom gis • COMMENT

Here’s something to keep your eye on: TileMill by Development Seed.

With TileMill, you can create custom maps by implementing your own design to GIS data, which you can then share to the public by embedding into your website.

It sounds and looks pretty amazing as seen with their example of the Afghan presidential elections in 2009.

The only drawback here is TileMill’s steep learning curve. Fortunately, Development Seed acknowledges the issue and promises to revamp for TileMill 2.0 and make it more user-friendly. Hooray!!

Not all mapping professionals are savvy developers, you know :)

Customizing Your Legend in ArcMap

by KUMIKO YAMAZAKI on August 13, 2010 • cartography esri • COMMENT

Here’s a new tip for ArcMap I didn’t know about – the ESRI Mapping Center provides a detailed tutorial on customizing your legend patch shapes: Mapping Center : New Legend Patch Shapes.

What am I even talking about? It’s the ability to turn your plain ol’ legend into something spiffy like this:

The shapes shown in the new legend are a smaller representation of an urban area or lake actually shown on the map. The process is not as automated as I’d like, as there are quite a few steps involved.

If the above tutorial is too much work, you can also choose a pre-defined patch shape rather than the dull rectangle.

Yet another alternative is to, you know, just export to Illustrator. Isn’t that what all cartographers do anyway?

HydroSHEDS- Global River Dataset in Hi-Rez

by BRITTA RICKER PETERS on March 18, 2010 • cartography gis • 1 COMMENT

Data sets are often segmented by political boundaries. Typically, who cares? People who deal with environmental phenomenon that do not stop or change across political boundaries, they are the ones who care. Normally a cartographer or GIS analyst will stitch together datasets, fight with projections and plow through for a quick fix to their problem. My former professor at McGill University, Dr. Bernhard Lehner, decided to take a different route when he ran into this problem when working with the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to characterize freshwater habitats within a remote region of the Amazon Basin.

First Dr. Lehner built a map with freshwater habitats of the entire Amazon Basin, then South America and now THE GLOBE! German cartographers do not cut corners!

The project is called “HydroSHEDS” (Hydrological data and maps based on Shuttle Elevation Derivatives at multiple Scales). Dr. Lehner used data gathered in 2000 by NASA’s Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM). He has produced the first high-resolution, seamless global river map in existence. You can read more about this project in the McGill Reporter, on Dr. Lehner’s website and on the WWF website where you can download the data set. This map in paper format will be featured in National Geographic on March 30!