Oil prices are a continuing concern of people all over the world. There are a lot of variables that enter into the price of oil, including where the supplies are relative to the demand and how much is controlled by a single party. Oil fields vary in size and in the amount of oil that they contain.I was curious about spatial distribution of oil fields and how much oil the fields contained. To visualize the issue I found data from the USGS. The shapefiles that you can download show the locations of many of the worlds known oil fields …

I recently came across an article on The Guardian that looks at gun crime in the United States. The article includes several maps and it also includes downloadable gun crime data for U.S. states. In this post I show how to import the downloaded data into Cartographica to replicate the maps produced in the article. To download the data click on "Get the Data" within the article and then download the data in .csv format. The data set contains the total number of murders, total firearm murders in 2010 and 2009, total handgun murders, and the rates of firearm …

I am always very interested in what's going on in Korea. The border disputes that have occurred there over the past several years have made tensions in the area very high. Despite my interest in what's going on I don't know a lot about the specifics of the situation. In this post I use Cartographica to explore the area a little more. One of the biggest issues I am interested in is the artillery fire associated with an island called Baengnyeong Island. A Huffington Post article describes the most recent situation developing there. The article says that the South Korean …

This post describes the process for collecting data using the new U.S. Census American Fact Finder website (Fact Finder2). The new website allows you to select data from almost all U.S. Census Bureau surveys. These include the Decennial U.S. Census and American Community Survey among many others. The new data collection process requires you to use a series of steps for collecting what you want. These steps are logical as you move from general to specific selections. To start, you first determine the dataset and year that you would like to use. Then you choose the geographic …

This post shows an image downloaded from Digital Globe that depicts the wreckage site of the Costa Concordia cruise ship. The ship wreck occurred off of the coast of Italy and is still currently being handled by officials there. There has been much media attention given to ship's captain who mysteriously abandoned ship before many of the passengers. He was taken into custody by Italian officials. For this post, I georeferenced the Digital Globe image using Cartographica so that we can create more informative maps and new data layers. The first step in using an image like the one downloaded …

CNN has released an interesting map that will be continually updated throughout the election year. The map shows CNN predictions for how they believe states will perform during the 2012 presidential election. The heading says that the map will be updated as new information becomes available. Probably the most interesting aspect of the map are the locations of the battleground states. Battleground states are those places that will have tough competition between the candidates. Also, another interesting feature of the map is that the total number of electoral votes is also included. This allows you to see which battleground states …

Microsoft has recently gained a patent for a GPS app that uses sources of data to alert users that they are approaching an unsafe area. The app links to GPS and smartphone devices to sources of crime data that alerts users if they are approaching an unsafe area.There currently is limited information about exactly what types of data the app will use and if it will account for other factors that may influence crime in specific areas. The complete functionality of the app has not yet been made available, but already the implications of the app are taking criticism …

The highly anticipated Republican Presidential Primary is being held today in New Hampshire. The New Hampshire Primary is a particularly important election because it is the first non-caucus election held for the run up to the Republican presidential nomination and the subsequent Presidential election. The election receives a lot of media attention and is used as a tool for analyzing and estimating the performance of elections held in other states. To honor the New Hampshire primary I have put together a data set with data collected from several sources. The dataset includes data from the American Fact Finder website, which …

MapDawg is a free internet site that provides numerous links to both international and domestic spatial data. Depending on where you are interested in studying it can often be difficult to find sources of reliable data. This site provides links to both governmental and private sources of spatial data that are generally ready to use with your GIS. The website alphabetically organizes the data by place starting with worldwide and international locations. Data are given from multiple continents, countries, and from all of the states within the U.S. The data found on these websites are compatible with Cartographica so …

Google has released an interactive map tracking the results of yesterday's Iowa Caucus. The map provides interesting information about the results for each county within Iowa. The map highlights the results for each candidate that participated in the highly publicized vote that kicks off the run-up to Republican Presidential nomination. According to the results, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum gained the highest percentage of votes at 25% each. The two candidates were only separated by 8 votes (Romney was the winner). Ron Paul also had a good showing gaining 21% of the vote, however he gained zero delegate votes. Click …

ClueTrust is pleased to announce the immediate availability of CartoMobile® 1.1 on the App Store! New features include adding lines and polygons, easy use of Raster data as base maps, multiple projection support, and more! Version 1.1 of CartoMobile is a huge release for us, starting with the name change. ClueTrust has decided to re-brand Cartographica Mobile as CartoMobile, both because the name "Cartographica Mobile" just doesn't fit well in the app screen on the iPhone, and also to differentiate its place as a field data tool, as opposed to a full-fledged GIS, like Cartographica. CartoMobile 1.1 …

ClueTrust is happy to announce the immediate availability of Cartographica 1.2.4, a bug fix release for Cartographica 1.2. This release contains no new features, and fixes a handful of bugs (some peculiar to OS X 10.7 Lion). The full release notes are available at MacGIS.com.

I recently found a website for Nordpil who have made available a data set of major urban centers world wide. The data set contains population data for all of the world's major cities. I created a Kernel Density Map using Cartographica to show where the highest densities of urban areas are located. I discuss the process in this post. Cartographica makes it easy to quickly explore GIS data. If you need the data for professional purposes then Cartographica allows you to make sharp looking maps in only a matter of minutes, while also allowing you to visualize your data. I …

ClueTrust is happy to announce availability of Cartographica 1.2.3, with updates for Lion compatibility and a handful of new features, as well as performance improvements and bug fixes. Check out the improvements in WFS, projection handling, import/export, performance for AppleScript and labeling. Come check it out at MacGIS.com. We are also providing a new 7-day key for anyone who has previously evaluated the software by visiting the lost key page. The feature list for this maintenance release is short: Support for exporting data tables from layers Automatic export for CartoMobile imagery Support for exporting raster layers …

In a recent article by Time a state lawmaker from California has suggested that California split into two separate states. While the article mentions that this is not the first time this type of shake up in the state has been suggested (Its been suggested 220 times!) the proposal seems to be getting more coverage this time around. I found the idea of splitting interesting and I wondered how the two states would differ in terms of social and political issues. For this post I am going to see which of the two new states would have more economic problems …

Rates are useful when we need to compare geographic units that have unequal distributions of population. For example, if we wanted to compare car ownership for two California counties, say, Los Angeles County and Fresno County we would want to take into account the populations of each county. If we did not take into account the population then we might conclude that people in Los Angeles are more likely to own cars than people in Fresno. However, it is possible that this is not the case. It may be that the density of car ownership is much higher in Fresno …

Cartographica is great for exploring data and for providing a quick way to evaluate geopolitical problems. The South China Sea dispute is an ongoing feud between the countries that have land bordering the South China Sea. In this post I show how to quickly add data and to create new layers that can be used to evaluate problems. This post is fairly practical. I read an article about the South China Sea dispute and found the issue to be quite interesting. However, I know little about the area and thought that a little analysis of my own might help me …

ColorBrewer is a free online database of color palettes that are designed to be used with GIS. The website allows users to select from a variety of colors that have been pre-selected and formatted for both quantitative and qualitative data. In this post I will show you the steps for quickly bringing ColorBrewer color schemes into Cartographica. Cartographica can accept palettes directly from the ColorBrewer site for use in the Color Palettes Window. Although we specifically point at ColorBrewer for good palettes, Cartographica can import any combination of numbers where the Red,Green, and Blue components are separated by commas …

Arizona is currently experiencing a large wildfire on its Eastern border. The fire has been raging for several weeks and new satellite imagery produced by the U.S.Department of Agriculture Forest Service allows us to keep a daily watch on the fires. A great thing about the USDAFS data is that it is downloadable in Geotif format which allows for easy mapping and exploration. In order to get the data into Cartographica all you need to do is download the GeoTIFF and then import the data as a raster file. Below are several of the images. The images are …

The Housing Price Index is a quarterly report produced by the Federal Housing Finance Agency that describes the quarterly performance of home values. The index is an important measure of the economy especially because of the recent problems in the housing sector. For this post I created a state level data set showing the percent changes in the HPI across the United States since the last quarter of 2011 using data from the FHFA In the image below the states that are in red have experienced the most problems with decreasing home values. States with either light or dark blue …