The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Mapping Hacks - for the bookshelf Major Keary |
A title in O'Reilly's outstanding Hacks series, Mapping Hacks, has the sub-title Tips and Tools for Electronic Cartography. It is printed on heavy glossy paper — to accommodate full-colour illustrations — which helps make the book thicker than usual for titles in the series.
Where Web Mapping focuses on tools and how to use them, Mapping Hacks includes a lot of useful where-is information that helps users locate map repositories and other resources. For example, Mac users will find the URL for Terrabrowser, an OS X program, that does much more than enable viewing of maps and satellite
images http://www.chimoosoft.com/terrabrowser.html
Readers should be aware of an America-centric bias; that is not a criticism, but
simply reflects the book's principal market. Local readers may have to do a bit
of extra work to find what they want. For example, Hack #6 describes an
interesting concept, LineDrive; the idea is to provide a diagram-like map, with
all extraneous detail removed, of the route between two places. The example — a
route map between Times Square (New York) and the White House (Washington) —
works well, but the site http://mapblast.com
doesn't cater for Australia (or probably anywhere else outside continental North America). It will show a map for any given
Australian postal address, but balks at anything else. There is another caveat:
some of the equipment mentioned may not be readily available here, or be subject
to different regulatory requirements.
However, the important issue is that the software tools and their use, and the
principles of electronic cartography, remain constant for wherever one may be.
Even though many of the examples use American images/maps, the hacks still
demonstrate the extraordinary range of things that can be done with map data.
Two interesting hacks show how to build a car computer (with instructions on
connecting a GPS to it, and how to display GPS data in a GUI application); and
how to build a car navigation system with GpsDrive, which runs on Linux
and FreeBSD. The book gives a URL,
http://www.gpsdrive.de which is presented in German and
requires (complete with "Achtung!!!") login and password; a Google search will
show English pages and links for download. I suspect GpsDrive works for only
Germany and U.S.A., but it may be worth exploring.
Another term from modern 'mapspeak' is geocode, which "is the process of adding
geographic coordinates, such as latitude/longitude, to
other information". The most common use seems to be geocoding street addresses,
which has a number of applications. Landmarks identified on a satellite
photograph can be geocoded to assist in converting the image to a map, and
incidents — of, for example, disease outbreaks — can be plotted to assist in
identifying patterns.
Mapping Hacks is a cornucopia of map-related information that covers tools,
techniques, sites, and explanations (if you don't know what a shapefile is, this
is where you'll find it described). The back cover says, "Whether you're
intrigued by the potential of GPS (as an electronic gadget], have geographic
data analysis problems to solve, or just love to read maps, Mapping Hacks will
give you new ways to work with one of the oldest and most useful geographic
tools"; that is an accurate summation of this title's content.
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Erie, Gibson, and Walsh: Mapping Hacks ISBN 0-596-00703-5 Published by O'Reilly, 525 pp., RRP $55.00 incl. GST |
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Reprinted from the March 2006 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
