Making Maps

A friend of mine owns a water sports business in the Caribbean and I wanted to help her out with creating some maps to show the location of one of her excursions and to display the coral reefs surrounding the island. (Actually, now that I think about it, it would be great to create an interactive map where you can see corals, sea grass beds, limestone cliffs, mangrove ecosystems and so on and so forth with the various coastal and marine habitats of interest. A data manipulation skill to learn for the future.)

So in pursuit of creating the map, I looked up GIS software and of course the daddy of it all is the US Geological Survey's The National Map page for downloading pre-existing maps and The National Map Viewer for creating custom maps. I'll admit, after taking up 15 of the 30 minutes max I wanted to spend on this little project just exploring the features and lingo of these tools, I decided that the USGS NM and NMV were more high tech and less user friendly than I wanted. So I went looking for an easier user interface (note, I didn't say better)...

And I found the National Geographic MapMaker Interactive tool which allowed me to do everything I wanted, like draw on the map, zoom in, choose a satellite version (vs. topographic or street map) of the island, everything I was looking for initially... except download an image ( you could download a pdf, which I suppose could be converted to an image, etc, etc. but I wanted it now! Thank you, MS Windows, for the PrtSc function but then I needed to crop out the window, so my "workaround" still involved work.)

Here's the route my friends take for one of their snorkeling trips:

After I created that map, I then got all excited to see where all the coral reefs are located around Vieques Island and found the excellent tool ReefGIS by ReefBase, which is a database used by several international coral monitoring networks with funding by the United Nations Foundation. Below is a map displaying corals by their depth.

Light purple is shallow reefs, mid purple is mixed shallow/deep reefs, and dark purple is deep reef. Unfortunately, the actual depths were not included in the map, but from my snorkeling experience, I can say the mixed depth reef ranged from 8 - 20 feet deep. After checking the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Coral Reef Conservation Program page, I learned that corals may grow to depths of over 200 ft and that shallow reefs may be considered up to 90 feet in depth. Wow! But then that makes me want to question the map's data and what ranges were set. Oh, well, at least it identifies location of corals around Vieques. Enjoy.

The Digital Shift 2014 Online Conference, Twitter Tag #TDS14

This online conference was well organized and technologically easy to navigate with a graphically pleasing interface. I'm glad I was able to log in and participate for a one of the sessions and a few of the poster presentations. I just wanted to make a quick note about:

StatBase, an open source data management software built on Joomla and created by an in house team of librarians and IT/ digital management librarians at the New Port News Public Library. They have basic documentation and information at their sourceforge page and at their libguide page. The presentation reminded me of Counting Opinion's LibPass and LibStat browser based distribute-able software for data collection and statistics presentation. I'd love to see what some of the forms pages look like and what the presentation of the data looks like. I guess I'd have to download a copy and mount it to play around.

I missed the first speaker for the Content Containers and Beyond Session at 12:15pm EST, but wow! the sessions were archived almost immediately and so I was able to review the excellent presentation on the Digital Public Library of America. Emily Gore talked about the Ps of the DPLA which were portal, platform, and partnerships.

• things a good portal can do with an aggregated collection of over 8 million items- create online exhibitions using items from different contributed collections (making use of linked data to form links of unique items that may be spread across the states), use GPS metadata to "place" items on a map for geographic discovery (this is good for people looking at local history) and make use of time/date metadata to "place" items on a timeline (perhaps best when looking a thematically linked items to see their appearance in history and if and how the when of them relates to the when of other items).
• by providing an API (application programming interface), the DPLA is a platform for other imaginings of how to use the data, or how to make the data relevant to your local area/ collection/ needs
• the DPLA relies on two types of partnerships - content hubs and service hubs, each which contribute digital items and their associated metadata, without which the DPLA would be a seriously unfun place to visit. They also have community advocates in the GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) "industry" to speak on the DPLA's behalf, like at conventions, local outreach events, etc. Types of partners include (and I list these for when thinking about writing a grant to look at the local level for these types of partners):
• libraries
• gov't agencies ( municipal?)
• museums
• non-profits (cultural centers, look at those that share your mission area?)
• universities
• encyclopedias (currently I'm in PR, so the Enciclopedia de Puerto Rico supported by the Puerto Rican Foundation for the Humanities is an example.)
• high schools and local universities with departments or student organizations in your area of interest
• historical societies
• international partners (continuing the PR example, el Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños at Hunter College, the City University of New York)
• Upcoming- standardization of vocabulary to describe rights statements from free text to perhaps checkbox able descriptions to allow filters to be applied to digital objects so that users could focus in on items in the public domain, or which allow reuse. a Knight News Challenge (grant?)

And finally, there was mention of Linked Open Data Library Archives Museums #LODLAM from Jon Voss of History Pin (funded by WeAreWhatWeDo) which would allow mashups of digital objects such as overlays of images on maps and overlays of information on images. 

Here's a list of links for me to do further study:

http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web?language=en
http://entopix.com/so-you-need-to-understand-language-data-open-source-nlp-software-can-help/
http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/lod/index.html
http://challenge.semanticweb.org/2014/submissions/
http://code4lib.org/