Blog: Mapping

Simple Forms Increase Data Submission Rates

As Eric mentioned in his post last week about the Pandemic Preparedness mapping project, we spent a lot of time limiting the complexity on the data entry side of the site. We needed something clean and easy to use that still ensures that all the needed information is collected from the public health organizations using the form. We spent a good amount time tweaking the data entry forms themselves to try and streamline the data entry process. I pulled together a short screencast to show how a good data entry process can work, specifically looking at the provincial drilldown widget that allows users to easily geotag their content.

Since I'm sure other folks working with large taxonomies are also struggling to make their data entry forms simpler and more user friendly, I wanted to share more detail on how I built this. It's entirely javascript, and though it took a bit of time it works in IE 6 and 7, as well as the more reasonable browsers out there like Firefox and Safari. Aside from normal cross browser testing, we also tested it to make sure it could handle large numbers of terms. I built the initial widget with a set of test data with just a dozen or so terms, and it worked great, but once I imported the full region/country/province list into Drupal, the widget needed to be fully reworked.

In its current state, the widget is fairly tailored to the particular kind of hierarchy that this site needed, but there is some starter code in my sandbox for people that want to try something similar on their own. Please beware that it will most certainly need some modifications to work in other sites.

Mapping on-the-ground public health organizations' capacity to respond to outbreaks

We just finished working on the Pandemic Preparedness Capacity Project, a new tool for InterAction and USAID that will be used to help prevent the spread of catastrophic disease outbreaks, especially bird flu. The goal of the site is to both improve both data collection from public health organizations on the ground and improve data visualization for policy makers here in Washington, D.C. We built this dynamic mapping portal on all open source software: the content management system is Drupal and the mapping stack is running on Mapnik, a C++/Python GIS toolkit.

We had a lot of fun working directly with Elizabeth Bellardo at InterAction, along with several other members on her team, to develop a strategy for making data collection, site administration and data presentation all incredibly simple. In addition to the strategy, we also did the site architecture, design, and development (of both Drupal and Mapnik). I want to use this post to show some of the behind-the-scenes details that are only available to the site administrators and the NGOs using the site.

Using Maps to Convey Information and Get People More Involved

Yesterday's announcement that the UNHCR and Google are mapping humanitarian work in refugee camps is a really encouraging sign of what's to come in online advocacy. Maps are incredible for the amount of digestible information they can quickly convey to a reader. 

Here's the part I loved most from what the UNHCR is saying about it:

Highlighted are not only the physical area of the camp and surrounding country, but key parts of daily life such as education and health in photo, text and video format. Within seconds, Google Earth brings the daily life of a refugee camp into your home thousands of kilometres away.

UNHCR is doing great work on the ground in places like Darfur, and they're generating content that really wouldn't have as strong an impact displayed in another way. In one glance, you can quickly get a sense of the water resource situation in this camp and the gaping lack of a health care facility.

Using Fresh, Quality Ingredients to Geocode, Geotag, and Geoviews Your News

We are currently working on a project for a disaster relief organization. Our client was interested in mapping aggregated disaster relief news over a map. This is something of a mini-project in itself, but a combination of awesome modules and some custom pieces made this job a relatively straightforward process.

The goal:

fig.1: A map with new stories + prominent country tags

fig.2: Click a map point to see the headline

The recipe:

• 40 disaster relief organization news feeds: These will serve as the raw sources for our news page — they provide the titles, stories and urls

• Yahoo Pipes: Mixes up and mashes together these 40 feeds into a few feeds for us to aggregate. In addition, it will geocode stories when it can, adding geo:lat and geo:lon tags to rss items.

• FeedAPI: The same core feed aggregation engine we are using on Managing News and other projects.

• FeedAPI Geo: A simple FeedAPI plugin I hacked together to tag a geocoded item with its respective country (in development, to be released soon)

• Geonames: A great API module that lets you hook into the free geonames service — FeedAPI Geo is using this to reverse-lookup a country name from a lat/lon point.

• Graphite: A custom mapping stack that allows nodes with a CCK lat/lon field to be mapped onto a simple CSS/XHTML based map with JavaScript popups. It provides a Views plugin, so all you do is choose the nodes you want, add the appropriate CCK lat/lon field, choose the graphite view style, and voila your nodes are on the map. (in development, to be released soon, expect delays)

• Tagadelic + Tagadelic Views: Two bread + butter tag visualization modules that let us take our country tags and show story distribution.

Bake in the oven for 45 minutes.

Beautiful!

A Glimpse at how Geocoding Helps Identify Stories in Managing News

I first noticed the trend at 4:00 pm yesterday afternoon when I was testing Managing News - it looked like something was going on in the Caribbean. I jumped over to CNN to see what was happening and saw that a major earthquake hit the Caribbean yesterday two hours before.

This morning I went back to Managing News to check out the earthquake coverage and checked out the geocoded map that Jeff talked about yesterday. The Caribbean earthquake news really jumps out.

Putting News Stories on the Map

We’ve long wanted our team aggregator and media analyzer Managing News to automatically geotag the news that it tracks. But getting this to happen presented some interesting questions and challenges. What does it mean to put a news story on map? Should it show where the news is coming from or what part of the world is being talked about?

We decided that in the case of Managing News and the people using it to monitor the news, it’s more important to map what the news is about. We want to be able to show a map that people can look at and immediately know what is being talked about – like in this map, showing news tracked about several key financial institutions activities.

But this raised more questions. How can you geocode the content of a news item, and could we do this meaningfully? And most importantly, how do we identify locations in a stream of text?