Global Connectivity Revisited; mapping out 58,288 flight routes

Sep 042011
 

I guess we can call this part two of the global con­nec­tiv­ity by flight exper­i­ment, which I have been work­ing on the past cou­ple of days. Once again, the data comes from openflights.org/data.html and is avail­able for free to the pub­lic. It is a very detailed set of data that requires just a lit­tle bit of mas­sag­ing to be usable in a desk­top work envi­ron­ment. In this blog post I would like to take you through some quick help­ful tips that should get you from down­load­ing the data and clean­ing it up to map­ping it in ArcMap. In all hon­esty, I would have loved Con­tinue reading »

Earthquake in Virginia; also felt in Toronto

Aug 232011
 

An earth­quake mea­sur­ing in at 5.9 mag­ni­tude, hit Vir­ginia (epicentre) at approx­i­mately 17:51:03 GMT. I am writ­ing this post from my office at Ryer­son Uni­ver­sity, Toronto, Ontario, where we also felt the ground move beneath us.… Okay, to be frank, I didn’t feel any­thing. But my class­mates and col­leagues have reported that they felt the earthquake. Now, the rea­son why I am post­ing about this, is not exactly because I think the earth­quake was that sig­nif­i­cant and worth men­tion­ing. I would like to share with you a lit­tle map that I cre­ated a few Con­tinue reading »

Using OpenStreetMap Data - P.2

Aug 222011
 

Lets talk about QGIS for a lit­tle bit before we go ahead and install it on our sys­tems. QGIS is an open source GIS pack­age that is under the GNU pub­lic license. It offers enough func­tion­al­ity for some­one with a ArcInfo Stu­dent License (myself) to want to explore. The usage of QGIS in day to day tasks has me spend­ing less time Con­tinue reading »